Happy Birthday, Mr. Andersen!

Today is the birthday of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), the creator and teller of "fairy tales," as the poor translation of the Danish "eventyrer" characterizes his "stories told for children." In fact, Andersen also wrote in the form of novels, theater pieces, poetry, and travel journals in addition to the output of 156 (or 212, depending on how you count them) stories that made him famous.  The travel pieces are probably the most surprising, but Andersen was a great traveler in the 19th century, going by coach or steam railway far from his native Denmark, throughout Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Spain, and beyond--even to England to pay an infamous visit to Charles Dickens and his family (he overstayed his welcome). Perhaps Andersen was wary of leaving England. He was fearful of ocean travel, a fact which prevented him from ever coming to the United States, even though he was invited and carried on a long correspondence with Horace Scudder, his American editor, and was glad to have some of the later eventyrer published in Boston before they were published in Denmark.

At rejse er at leve, Hans Christian Andersen famously remarked: "To travel is to live. " Andersen traveled for months on end, and often enough that for several years he had no permanent residence--he simply traveled or lived in a hotel in Copenhagen. You can still see his room upstairs between the Hotel d'Angleterre and Magasin du Nord in Kongens Nytorv, King's New Square, in Copenhagen, or at least you could as recently as 2005, when the city celebrated the bicentennial of his birth.

I've been traveling in the past weeks, but unlike Andersen, I stayed in my own country this time. It is delightful to discover something new, that you have never seen before, in your own country. In this case it was even more pleasant because I discovered it in Florida, a state that I have visited several times, but mostly Orlando and Kissimmee, where my parents and an aunt lived for many years.

This trip took us to Fort Lauderdale to make use of a four-night stay in a private home that I had "won" as part of a benefit auction last year. Our host warned us against coming during March and April, as that is spring break time, and the place is overrun with tourists, he said. But that is when there was time available on our schedules, so that is when we went. Somehow I never "did" spring break during my youth. I never had the money for an extended trip, and I was lucky to get home from college at spring break instead of staying in the dorm alone for a week. During my freshman year I remember a dorm neighbor bringing a souvenir back from her spring break to my roommate and me--a fork she had "forgotten to return" to her vacation hotel, the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. We added it to our "kitchen utensils" centered around the popcorn popper--that was what we cooked in illegally in dorm rooms in those days.

Since we were going to spend four days in south Florida and this was my first pleasure trip there (I had been to Miami Beach only once before, for a conference at the convention center) we decided to go the extra mile, so to speak, and we spent three nights in Key West. A shuttle picked us up in the Ft. Lauderdale airport at 2:30 in the afternoon and drove us south and west on US 1, and by 7:00 we were on what I thought was the westernmost Key of the Florida Keys. I learned later that Key West is not the westernmost Key and that the name "Key West" was an anglicization of Cayo Hueso, island of the bones, because it was used as a commercial graveyard for prehistoric peoples, and bones were found by the first Europeans to explore the island. We explored Key West mostly by the hop-on, hop-off bus, and saw several of the sites along the route, but we didn't push ourselves too much. It was a relaxing few days, with good eating, gallery visits, some walking, and wandering among interesting architecture and gardens.

The Key shuttle appeared again to take us back to Ft. Lauderdale, and we passed along US 1 again, this time facing the hurricane evacuation signs, and then were escorted to a delightful Spanish-style villa within walking distance of the Atlantic Ocean in Lauderdale. This house reminded us very much of our home in Spain, but its completely surrounding garden was more lush, and our time there was as at an oasis. We took a boat trip along the New River and saw lavish homes, and walked to the beach and a mall (imagine being able to walk to an Apple store!), and bought good fish and prepared it ourselves in the well-equipped and comfortable kitchen. This was a delightful period of reading, eating well, and living in beautiful and peaceful surroundings. It was definitely more relaxing than most of our vacations--we moved at a sedate pace.

Mr. Andersen would have approved, I think.