Road trip
Welcome to the week’s Reno News & Review.
I hesitate to tell you this. You might get the idea my family is as geeky as I am. Well, the truth hurts, as they say.
Last week, we decided to head down to San Jose on Sunday. Amy, our oldest, is visiting from Seattle. My third grader, Hunter, is studying Egypt. Sunday was Super Bowl Sunday. It seems all the random factors aligned for the family to take a four-hour drive (each way) to the Rosicrucian Egyptian museum.
The weather couldn’t have been better. The sun was out, the roads were dry, the highways were unoccupied.
Actually, it was pretty entertaining. The place wasn’t hard to find: Just stop at the Starbucks across the street and ask directions from the vaguely Egyptian-looking guy.
The museum was a peculiar mix of sophistication and naiveté. I mean, some display descriptions, which appeared to be made with a manual typewriter in the late ’60s, had misspellings, a few missing words, bad grammar—you know, the usual museum stuff. But what’s funny is those people chose to ignore the errors for 30-some years.
Other than that, and the somewhat bizarre movie in the planetarium promoting some Rosicrucian ideas about the zodiac, it was a pretty cool museum.
There were a good number of real mummies, Egyptian antiquities and reproductions. It’s not the King Tut exhibit, but I managed to learn some stuff. I’d also have to admit there was some “information” I was a little suspicious of. For example, the Pharaoh Akhenaton, a guy who tried to change the theocracy of Egypt to a monotheistic one with the sun at the top, seemed to take a higher profile in the Rosicrucian view of history than I’ve seen from other sources.
Honestly, the best thing about our field trip was the drive down. As we descended into palm-tree land, it was like a fast-forward to spring. Along similar lines, I notice the crocuses and daffodils here in Northern Nevada are beginning to poke their little green fingers out of the dirt.