The first thing I saw when I logged on this morning was a message from my editor. Could you drop your plans for the day, he asked me, and go to the parking lot of RFK stadium to cover a pop-up dinosaur theme park?

I’d like to tell you I’m too busy for these kinds of assignments. But it’s been a week. Heck, it’s been a year. I needed this.

Jurassic Quest, a drive-thru exhibition of more than 70 life-size animatronic dinosaurs, made its D.C. debut Friday. The prehistoric activity is marketed as completely safe for the COVID era: Guests pull into Lot 5 at RFK Stadium (crumbling, yes, but not quite cretaceous), pull up an audio guide on their phones, then drive around and look at the dinosaurs. Even the gift shop at the end is a drive-thru.

The true-to-life robots are indeed quite large — an 80-foot Spinosaurus here, a 55-foot Megalodon there — though many of them end up looking almost dinky due to the scale of the massive parking lot. It may be best to schedule your visit after dark, when the dinosaurs are lit up and the sandbags supporting them are not.

The path through the Cretaceous, Jurassic and Triassic Periods has been marked by what must be hundreds of small yellow traffic cones. Maneuvering through them quickly starts to feel like being trapped in a driver’s ed test you know you’re going to fail. (I knocked down two cones.)

Along the way, you can stop and watch the animatronic dinosaurs do what animatronic dinosaurs do best — move their heads very slowly from side to side. If you turn off your audio guide and roll down your windows, you’ll hear the motors inside the dinos squeaking like a chorus of giant, angry mice.

“A lot of people think that dinosaurs actually roared, but little did we know they actually made a high-pitched squeaking sound,” says Caleb Hughes, a.k.a. Captain Caleb the Dinosaur Trainer, a Jurassic Quest employee. My elections-addled brain believes him until he kindly explains he’s making a joke.

“No no, they’re just in desperate need of WD-40,” he laughs.

Hughes is dressed in an Indiana Jones-style getup, complete with a coiled black whip and belt of fake bullets. He’s carrying around a baby Camarasaurus, a long-necked herbivore that looked a bit like Littlefoot from “The Land Before Time.”

“I took theater in high school,” he tells me when I ask how he landed the gig. Jurassic Quest did, however, consult with actual paleontologists when making the animatronic dinosaurs, he assures me.

While Jurassic Quest boasts dozens of different species, it does not include the one dinosaur discovered in D.C.: the Capitalsaurus. Construction workers found the bones of the Cretaceous-era beast in Southeast D.C. in 1898.

Jurassic Quest is a Texas-based company that stages its drive-thru in cities across the country (the company has no connection to the Jurassic Park franchise). It’s renting in the District from EventsDC, which manages the RFK Stadium site for the city.

“We’ve really been trying to take this space and add some vibrancy to it in a COVID-safe way,” says deputy mayor John Falcicchio, who toured Jurassic Quest Friday. “There’s no blue and red dinosaurs. There’s just a lot of family fun.”

Over the past few months, the city has leased the space around RFK for drive-in movie screenings, comedy shows and church services. A temporary art installation honoring all the Americans who have died from COVID-19 has been installed on the other side of the stadium.

The city isn’t renting out space within the stadium itself, which is scheduled for demolition within the next few years.

In the Jurassic Quest lot, the good times don’t come cheap — the price of admission is $49, plus optional $15-$50 “dinosaur-themed quest pack add-ons” that come with three to five “dinosaur surprises,” according to the website. The entry price jumps to $80 if your car holds nine or more people.

But in this era of online school, endless Zooms, and constant election speculating, maybe paying $49 to drive through a parking lot full of enormous squeaking dinosaurs isn’t as crazy as it might have sounded back in the Good Year 2019.

“The kids are dying for something to do, and their parents are trying to get them out,” says Dustin Baker, another Jurassic Quest employee. “You don’t have to worry about the risk involved. You’re in your car, you’re having fun with your kids. And you can even bring snacks!”