U.S.born stuntman turned Captain Robert McDonald of the Sea Heart Foundation has built a ship made out of recycled ice cream sticks. Yes thats right, ICE CREAM STICKS!!..

He calls the ship Mjollnir. That’s Norse for Hammer of Thor. It’s as long as an 18-wheeler, with a Viking dragon snarling from the prow, and Robert McDonald wants to sail it from the Netherlands to the Florida Keys. Viking ships have crossed the Atlantic before. But the Mjollnir is made of Popsicle sticks. Fifteen million Popsicle sticks, some of them used and steam-cleaned, the white-birch bones of frosty treats devoured by children around the world.

McDonald is a professional daredevil from Jacksonville’s Southside, and he has pulled enough stunts in his 46 years — free-climbing the Grand Canyon, for example — to earn a place alongside Jackie Chan and John Wayne in the Hollywood Stuntmen’s Hall of Fame. Some back story may help explain McDonald’s audacity. When he was 10, he carried a gas can too near a barbecue grill in the yard of his family’s house on Ryar Road. The gasoline exploded and left third-degree burns on 70 percent of his body. He spent six months at a burn center in Texas, befriending children who’d lost eyes and lips and ears.
One day he was watching the Superman TV show from his hospital bed when he decided that children needed a real-life hero to believe in. He appointed himself.He estimates he has hand-delivered 20 million toys to hospitalized children, including all four corners of Bosnia during an atrocious war.

Getting back to the ship, the 15-metre (50-foot) long ship, named after the Norse god Thor, is made from 15 million recycled ice-cream sticks glued together by US-born stuntman Robert McDonald, his son and more than 5,000 children.Bison International sent him rivers of saltwater-proof glue. Unilever donated nearly 13 million sticks. The rest came from children and other believers. Nearly 5,000 visited McDonald’s borrowed warehouse and helped build the ship, designed from a Viking blueprint McDonald downloaded off the Internet.

The Viking ship made from ice-cream sticks started its 1st voyage from Netherlands to England on Tuesday. From England the crew plans to sail to Shetland Islands, then Shetland fjords, Iceland and Greenland and Lancing Meadow will be their
final destination. Loaded with cuddly toys, the crew aim to follow the Dutch and Belgian coast down to northern France before crossing the Channel to England where they plan to visit children in hospitals..

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