Today was drive up to San Francisco and have a look around… day. Starting with the Golden Gate Bridge. Now if you take the last freeway exit before crossing the Golden Gate and drive along the road a bit you’ll find a gravel car park. Which will be completely full. So instead keep going down a winding road for a couple more minutes and you’ll end up at San Francisco Bay / Crissy Field. Not only is it a nice area but it will take you longer to walk to the Golden Gate. Actually there are a quite a few other sites to see around the area so getting a good park is handy.

Just down the road from the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum you can find the San Jose Municipal rose garden.

There’s an unwritten rule in digital photography that when you come across a fountain you have to take a minimum of five pictures of it. Again the goal being quantity not quality.

Leaving Mountain View I headed down to San Jose and visited the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.
Driving around is actually really easy once you know where you are going. Typically all trips involve a four step process: get onto freeway, drive, get off freeway, profit! However, I would suggest using GPS navigation instead of my antiquated post-it note system.

This was the best Egyptian museum I’ve ever been too¹. The outside grounds have a really cool Egyptian theme going on with plenty of photo opportunities. Inside there are several floors to explore including a small mock tomb in the basement. While quite a few of the artifacts are replicas, I couldn’t tell the difference (although having replica on the description gives it away).

One of the top floors outlines the story of the Pharoah Akhenaten who single handedly attempted to manipulate Egyptian religion into only worshiping one god (Aten). Akhenaten ended up founding a new capital city and attempting to eliminate worshiping of all other gods. Banning of idols, defacement of temples, etc. Eventually Akhenaten was succeeded by Tutankhaten (later known as Tutankhamun) who ended up abandoning the city as Aten fell out of favour.

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1. also it has been the only Egyptian museum I’ve been too

Having the freedom of a rental car means you can go where you want, when you want. As an added bonus driving by yourself also allows you to acquire a vast amount of driving experience (read: getting lost and driving around for hours on end).
Freeways are not very pull over to the side of the road and check the map friendly. Fortunately I discovered that navigation problems can be solved with pre-planning, post-it notes, and Google Maps.

So after making a list of places to see and grouping them into days; I ended up at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. In my defense I wasn’t the only person looking around, there was another guy.

The Computer History Museum ended up being really interesting and I would recommend it to non-techies. They have an impressive collection ranging from old Cray super computers to an Enigma machine. Even an Altair 8800 is sitting on a shelf amongst its future children.

Not a fridge but an Interface Message Processor – the first packet router for the Arpanet.

Happy New Year

Yet another photo, this time of the west coast (Devonport from my previous post is on the east coast). Actually this isn’t one photo but two. I cheated and stitched them together using Hugin. Unfortunately I forgot to lock the exposure between shots which meant some further tweaking with the GIMP was required. It turned out amazingly well considering I wasn’t really going for a panorama at the time. Which just proves the digital photography mantra of quantity over quality.

Muriwai Beach is not only a good spot for swimming, camping, and surfing; there is also a short walk to a Gannet colony. For more information have a look on the ARC website.