Thursday, June 3, 2010

Pharoahs, MacArthur, and a Trip Down Memory Lane!

The kids and I spent a good part of today in Little Rock.

This morning we drove to the Arkansas Arts Center to meet a group of friends and tour the World of the Pharaohs exhibit. We weren't allowed to take cameras into the exhibit, but here is a tiny sampling of the items we saw. (Click on photo/video gallery at the link.)

One interesting fact that our docent mentioned is that King Tut's father was recently identified. You can read the details of it in this article.

We learned a lot about ancient Egypt, and it was nice to get a little jump start on our next year's history studies as we'll be back around to the ancients in TOG Year 1.

After our time at the Pharaohs' exhibit, we met Joe for lunch at Juanita's Mexican Cafe. It is close to the Arts Center and is a restaurant where Joe frequently took me to dinner while we were dating. We don't go to Little Rock to eat out very much now that our town has grown and acquired so many restaurants, so it was fun being back at Juanita's with our four children.

Did any of you ever watch the show Designing Women in the late '80s or early '90s? (I loved that show for its first five seasons; after the original four women began leaving the series, it was never the same.) Do you remember the Sugarbaker house? Joe and I got married there. Actually, we got married at the Villa Marre in Little Rock, but it is the house that was shown as the outside of the Sugarbaker house on the show. (The inside of the house looks nothing like the inside of the Sugarbaker house.) The reason I mention it is that it is just a couple of blocks from Juanita's, and I never miss a chance to drive our children by it when we are in the vicinity. So we drove by today. You can read all about the history of the Villa Marre, along with some Designing Women tidbits, here.

On the stairs in the Villa Marre after our wedding.


Leaving the Villa Marre after our reception. Joe's brother, John, who passed
away last summer from leukemia, is in the foreground on the right. You can see my dad's head in the background on the right, and our niece, Dion, is standing in front of the steps on the left. Our nephew, Phillip, is the little guy on the far right. You can tell it has been a few years since our wedding as Phillip is about to get married himself.

After lunch, we headed to the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History. (Click on About The Museum at the bottom of the page when you get to the site.) General Douglas MacArthur was born in the building where the museum is housed while his father, a soldier, was stationed there. We spent some time looking through various exhibits detailing the participation of Arkansans in various wars. We also watched a documentary about General MacArthur's life.

MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History

All in all we had a great day.

1 comment:

  1. Oh it looks like a fabulous day! Wish I could have tagged along

    ReplyDelete