King Tut and a Rainforest

The short story is this: Dave has always had an interest in Ancient Egyptian Archeology, so for his birthday we gave him tickets to the renowned and world-traveling Tutankhamun exhibit at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.

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The long story is this: While I intended for him to escape to the city for a day of alone-time and museum-wandering, he just couldn't take a precious day off without including us. So we figured out a way to make it into yet another family outing. The neighboring California Academy of Science Museum has been totally refurbished since the last time we were there and one day a month they offer a free day. The girls and I decided to explore that while Dave checked out King Tut's tomb and artifacts. Let me just say up front that anyone planning to take advantage of the 3rd Wednesday of the month Free Day needs to have A LOT of patience. We arrived shortly after the museum opened and still waited an hour to even get in. Once inside, we definitely battled the crowds. But the museum is amazing and the $50 entrance fee is steep, so it was totally worth it.

The first thing we saw were the dinosaur bones. The girls were in awe.

This museum is expertly designed. The ground floor is Africa and Rainforest. The exhibits are incredible (more on that later). We actually started by going to the basement level-- an underground aquarium where we could view everything underwater that the people above us were viewing in atrium and pools! We walked through a whole tunnel of fish, saw an albino alligator in the swamp, touched starfish and urchins in the tide pools and felt an anaconda's squeeze in the Amazon.

I couldn't tear Ella away from the mesmerizing jellyfish display.

We watched the sharks and rays being fed. This bridge was neat because it had portholes in it. Delia was laying down watching them swim right beneath her.

We met up with Dave in the afternoon for the Rainforest exhibit. This was a 4-story, glass dome housing exotic birds and butterflies.

The butterflies were floating everywhere (I didn't post the dozen pictures I took of just butterflies...you're welcome.) and we were completely delighted when we discovered that they LOVED Dave! They kept landing on him! Well, I should clarify: I was delighted. Delia was totally freaked out and wouldn't go anywhere near Daddy once she figured this out. Ella, who spent the entire hour we were in the exhibit with her finger stretched out as a butterfly-landing perch, was heartbroken that they wouldn't land on her.

The best one-- a Blue Morpho, as big as a bird!

In the Africa exhibit, we got to see live penguins. This is Dunker, a docent told us, flirting with Delia on the other side of the glass.

So here's our review:

*The King Tut exhibit gets a big thumbs up from Dave.

*The California Academy of Science Museum gets a big, huge, giant thumbs up from all of us!

*Going on a Free Day even gets a thumbs up, though prepare those thumbs for some twiddling as you wait in lines.