(Post and Image provided by Carter Debruyn)
Today our group got to check out many of the museums in Stockholm. We started off the day by spending our morning in the Swedish history museum as a full group. The museum walked us through the history of Sweden as well as about the lives of Vikings. From there the group split up for lunch, and we then went to various museums as smaller groups. I went to the Viking Museum, the Spirit Museum, and the museum pier of the National Maritime Museum.
At the museum pier there were three ships that we could learn about. The largest boat to tour was the Sankt Erik icebreaker, Sweden’s first icebreaker. It was launched in 1915, then converted from burning coal to burning oil in 1958. It has been a museum ship since 1980, but is still floating and is taken out to sea once a year. My favorite ship that we toured was the lightship Finngrundet. It serves as a lighthouse for places where it is too deep for a conventional lighthouse but still shallow or dangerous enough to warrant a lighthouse being there. In the case of the Finngrund, it was stationed above shallow sand banks where ships used to frequently run aground. It was very cool to see the inside of these big ships and to be able to go up the lighthouse tower in Finngrundet. The third ship was the Minesweeper M20. It was a minesweeping ship built in Stockholm and launched in 1941 for World War II. We were not able to tour this ship as much because it was being prepared to be taken on its yearly trip out to sea. It was nice to have time to check out any museum we wanted and very cool to be able to go aboard these ships!