Et tut?

(cue Steve Martin's song)

Let me state that ancient Egypt is big in our house. If I hear Hubby up late watching television, it's not porn I'm sharing my husband with. Instead, it's various Egyptologists and their theories behind everything from how the pyramids were built to what really happened to Queen Hatshepsut. I can't complain, after all, N's conception blessing was at a temple of Sekhmet. The girls have shown enthusiasm for such studies, too, so we don't hear complaints when Jimmy Neutron is switched over to Bob Brier.

So, when the Boy King was within driving distance, it wasn't a matter of if, but rather when. Which was last weekend. Seven hours on the road, rhumba lessons at 3 am in the room above us at the hotel, over an hour in line waiting to get in, and we were THERE, Man.

Old stuff. REALLY old stuff. Really old broken stuff but it was so old and so cool it didn't matter. Most everything was from someone else's tomb, not Tutenkhamen's, but it was still goose-pimply exciting.

But what we really wanted to see was the Big Wow, as Hubby called it. You know, what you see in your mind when you think of King Tut. The funerial mask, in all its gilded glory, with the reds and the blues, the snakes and that flail thing. And the eyes - had to see those eyes. I was getting shivers just thinking about it. Soon it was nearing 8 pm, and the girls were either a) too tired b) too overwhelmed with so much to see or c) too interested in going to the kids fun section instead of being with all these stodgey adults oohing over a viscera vessel that they were ready to move on. We had to briefly look at the really cool things to get to the Big Wow before we lost them.

And then, suddenly, we were at the gift shop. Wait! Where's the Big Wow? Did we miss it? Crap!

Nope, turns out Egypt refused to let The Big Wow out of the country. All those advertisements and posters and websites and three-story-high commandments to SEE TUT HERE! with the funerial mask demanding your attention were misleading. What a letdown.

But it was still cool, and we don't regret it, or the eight hours it took us to get home.