When Aunt Davia and Uncle Rich planned to visit Stockholm in the country of Sweden, they did not plan on bringing Bobby and Nelly with them. Much to their surprise, when they were unpacking their suitcase, they found Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly nestled in between pairs of underwear!
Stockholm is made up of 14 different islands. Many of them are connected by bridges that you can walk or drive across, but there are some islands that you have to travel to by boat. Boats that take passengers short distances are sometimes called ferries. Aunt Davia and Uncle Rich decided to take Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly to visit the most famous museum in Stockholm.
To get to the museum, first we had to take the Stockholm Metro to a part of the city called Slussen.
After getting off of the train, we had to wait for a ferry to take us to the island with the museum. The ferry was a short 15 minute ride on a small boat that had the capacity to hold a few dozen passengers.
Aunt Davia and Uncle Rich did not do much research about the island, so they were pleasantly surprised to discover there were actually two museums on this island! The first museum that they were surprised about was the Museum of Wrecks, a small museum dedicated to shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea, which is the large body of water near Sweden.
In this museum there were artifacts that were recovered from shipwrecks that were hundreds of years old! In front of the museum they had a Scuba diver to show what the people have to put on in order to dive deep beneath the water to recover these items.
The shipwreck museum was lots of fun, but the main attraction on this island is the Vasa Museum. The Vasa was a huge warship that was built from 1626 to 1628. That means that in the year 2022, the Vasa was built 394 years ago! That’s almost as old as Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly’s grandparents.
The King of Scotland wanted to build a gigantic warship to show how strong Sweden was and scare their enemies. The king told his shipmakers to build the most fancy and intimidating ship that they could. It took two years to build the Vasa. It had many cannons made of bronze and lots of expensive decorations. Unfortunately for the King and for Sweden, the ship had so many cannons that it was not stable in the water. When they launched the Vasa into the Baltic Sea, a strong wind literally blew the ship over and it sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea within minutes! It sat under about 100 feet of water for a long time.
In 1961, more than 300 years after the Vasa sank, the Swedish government invested a lot of resources to recover the Vasa from the bottom of the sea and put it in a museum so tourists like Aunt Davia and Uncle Rich had something to do during the day.
The Vasa looks enormous in person; it’s 226 feet long and 172 feet high! It had enough room for 450 people — and they did not have toilets that flush.
After enjoying a few days in Stockholm, Aunt Davia and Uncle Rich took Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly on a train ride from Stockholm’s Central Station to Copenhagen for some new adventures.
Thank you! I hope you had a good day and a good train ride. Nelly is wondering what the decorations on the Vasa were meant for and what were they trying to scare away on the ship?
The decorations were meant to show how rich and powerful the Swedish people were, as well as to scare any enemies they may battle with (it is a warship, after all)