The ferry ride over takes 15 minutes. Today we sit outside in the back of the boat because it's another lovely, but cloudy day, so we will see.
The King's yacht is parked next to our apartment. At 260' she is a beauty.
First up is the Fram Museum. One of the two A-Framed buildings is devoted to the exploration of the Northwest Passage across the top of Canada.
John Franklin led an expedition in 1845 and his two ships and 129 men were lost after heading west from Greenland. In the next 4 decades more men were lost LOOKING for Franklin, his men and their ships than were lost in the original expedition.
The story of the Fram is fairly interesting, because I'm sure at the time someone said, "You want to do what?".
It's the late 1800's and explorers are trying to reach the North Pole - just because it's there. So this guy says, "I'm going to float a boat on the ice and have the ice take me there." Right.
The ship's hull is shaped in a way that as the water freezes around it the ship will rise out of the ice and sit on the ice. Well, the boat didn't get crushed, but the flow of the ice and wind didn't allow the boat to get to the pole. It did get closer than any other boat, however.
Fram was also the boat that Roald Amundsen used during his quest to reach the South Pole first - which he did a little over a month sooner than Admiral Perry.
After a quick lunch next door at the Norwegian Maritime Museum, we crossed the street to The Kon Tiki Museum to see the Academy Award winning 1950 film, Kon-Tiki. From our planning we knew it only showed at noon, so we timed this out carefully.
Upstairs from the theatre was the famous Kon Tiki raft. It’s actually bigger than I imagined it would be. The fact that the main logs are balsa wood also surprised me. I thought balsa trees were reeeeally thin and only used for model building.
Thor Heyerdahl’s intent in sailing from Peru to the Polynesian Islands was to prove that South American Indians could possibly have sailed from the West and could have populated those islands.
With his crew of 5 friends, they successfully made the journey after 101 days and 4,300 miles.
Also on display was Ra II, Thor’s 2nd papyrus raft that he built to sail from Morocco across the Atlantic. He thought that the Egyptians and the Indians of Peru had a lot in common. He was investigating whether it was possible to sail to the top of South America on a boat like the pharaohs had.
What an adventurous person he was.
Walked back across the street to the Norwegian Maritime Museum to finish off this day of maritime madness.
This museum also starts off with a movie, a very cool over-Norway movie. They fly over a lot of fjords and coastal towns. You really get a sense of how much of Norway is right on the water and therefore how important the sea and maritime history is to them.
This was the biggest of the three museums. It had a lot of models and a lot of interactive displays.
There was a mock up of a few floors of an old cruise ship. Karen felt right at home.
We walked back to our apartment, mostly on the same route as yesterday, but longer. We stopped at the end of our little inlet to enjoy some sun.
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