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.

I’ll sneak in a quick post before the new year and wish you all a merry appropriate holiday. Those of us in the southern hemisphere get to spend this time frolicking in the sun and enjoying the outdoors. This is in contrast with northern hemisphere dwellers who have to deal with a frozen wasteland full of ice and monsters.

Went to the fireworks display at Waitakere Stadium last night. All I can say is WOW.

Those free style motor cross riders were amazing.

As for the actual fireworks display it was even more impressive. Some of those explosions you could really feel. According to the time stamps on my photos the display lasted about twenty minutes!

Aside: Every year in New Zealand they (the media) talk about banning the selling of fireworks. So every year people act more and more stupid as this will be “the final year”. I believe now it has snow balled to the point where it might actually happen.

Fortunately there will always be large scale events such as this one to look forward to.