So my father and I want to go on a small trip to find some fossils. Looking to do a short trip 2-4 days in length around a weekend. We are from the north east so most of the formations that we have gone to are Silurian Ordovician or Devonian in age. We were hoping to take a trip to find some more varied types of fossils, one idea that I had was to go out west and look for some newer fossils, hopefully vertebrates and further more something terrestrial instead of the aquatic stuff we're used to out here (however fossil lake would be fun for the fish fossils). We both have passports so going to say Canada or Mexico would also be fine, but we'd rather stay inside the US.
My understanding of hunting for something like dinosaur bones in the badlands is that they are embedded in rock that is very hard and very difficult to remove the specimens, it seems that finding dino bones on such a short trip seems unlikely.
What do you guys recommend? should we stay home? Go south (I know nothing about the formations in the south)? Make the trip west? Wherever we go some site recommendations would be cool too. Thank you all so much for any help you can give!