Monday, September 9, 2024

Museum, Museum, Museum

The weather was threatening rain later in the day so we decided to go to the outdoor museum first and then the indoor ones later in the day.
The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History is an open-air museum with more than 150 buildings relocated here from all over the country and was established in the late 1800’s.
The center of the grounds is the Stave Church, a medieval building made of pillars planted into the ground and then built above the ground.  The roof is all wood.  There are no seats inside the church and the walls are carved and painted with the stories from the Bible and pictures of Norwegian saints.

All around the grounds are buildings where people lived, worked, slept and farmed.   Storage barns, sheep sheds, cow barns and horse stalls dotted the whole area.  

Next stop was the Fram Museum depicting the voyages of Roald Admunsun and his attempts to reach the North Pole.  They held two of his ships and told the story of his attempts to fly over the pole.  All well done and very interesting.

The third museum was the Kon Tiki and Ra Museum showing the voyages of Thor Heyerdahl from Peru to Tahiti on a raft made of 9 balsa wood logs overlaid with more wood, a small cabin and a sail. They floated on the currents to prove that peoples from South America could have arrived on the Pacific Islands.  Keep in mind this was accomplished in 1947.
A few years later he did the same thing with rafts made from reeds he named RA and floated to the Galápagos Islands to prove that natives from Ecuador had arrived there ages ago.

By this time we are museumed out!  It’s time to pack our bags.

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