It's Steve (now in blog form)

Considering that my last field trip involved my overwhelming love of dinosaurs and rocket ships, I am clearly still an 8 year old science dork.  Last week’s trip to Legoland really just beat that dead horse a little more.

Legoland is absolutely the best theme park for little kids.  Everything is geared to the under 5 crowd.  Ben had an absolute blast/sensory overload weekend.  Check out the whole gallery here.

Legoland has the most beautiful array of primary colors.  It’s like an acid trip in a Play-Doh factory.

The attention to detail paid by the Lego sculptors is amazing.  Here are some geometric Lego boobs.

Sad: the urinals were not lego. Creepy: the Lego clown watched me pee

Duploland is really fun

Legoland has the best bathroom signs ever.

400k Legos, 4 tons, 5 Lego dorks who build these rather than date

Ben stole my shoes

Ben liked the aquarium.  I always thought Legos float.

The Lego baboon has a red Lego ass

The kid is fast.

Ben grabs his hog and heads for home.  TCB!

I’m a big fan of vintage travel posters, sci-fi, and space travel.  Steve Thomas has brilliantly combined all of the above into something I know I’m going to end up ordering.  Check out his collection.  I think I’m going to get the Shanghai poster first.

While I was in Stockholm I saw something amazing enough to warrant it’s own post.  Built in the mid-17th century, the Vasa was one of the largest sailing ships of it’s day.  Nearly 70 meters long, it had three gun decks and would have been a powerful lever for the Swedish in their long war against Poland.

Unfortunately, ship design was far from scientific in that era.  As the tallest ship attempted by Swedish shipwrights, they underestimated how top heavy it would be.  Fully laden with cannon, dignitaries, and women and children, it foundered only minutes after first deploying it’s sails.  It took on water and sank in one piece in 150 feet of water.

Here’s where it gets really cool.  In the late 1960′s a hobbyist decided to find the shipwreck.  This mainly involved dropping a sharpened pipe on a line over the side of his rowboat and seeing if it reeled in with any wood in the pipe.  After a few years the lucky Swede found it.  A massive salvage effort was undertaken which was successful in raising the Vasa intact.  It was pumped out and managed to float to the docks on it’s own keel after 333 years under the sea.

The Vasa museum is really amazing.  The ship is housed in such a way that you can get to every angle from below the keel to above the rigging.  On entering, you can’t help but be struck by how enormous these ships are.  I’ve been a fan of naval technology for a long time, but I don’t know that I’ve ever grasped how immense they really were.  It certainly makes a lot more sense how meso-american civilizations would assume they brought gods ashore.

The other amazing bit is how perfectly it was preserved.  The northern seas aren’t salty enough to support the types of ocean parasites than normally consume wooden shipwrecks.  This isn’t just a skeleton; even the ornate decorative carvings and the canvas sails survived.

Check out the pics. They are really amazing.  This definitely made up for the lack of the aurora borealis on this trip.