Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
July 28, 2016 11:00 a.m.
Back from vacation and shedding a cold, I haven’t been able to check out any of our local attractions. So I thought I’d share some vacation stories with you. My daughter and two grandchildren joined me on an 11 day Baltic cruise. My daughter picked the shore excursions, which can be problematic when you have a daughter who does half-marathons and mini-triathlons.
We visited Copenhagen, Oslo, Rostock, Tallinn, St. Petersburg, Helsinki and Stockholm. Every vacation should have a goal. Mine was to have a beer in all 7 cities. I made succeeded in five of them. In Oslo when I asked about the local beer, the waiter said it wasn’t very good. So I ended up with a Spanish beer, Alhambra, which may be one of the best I’ve ever tasted.
We were on a Princess cruise. Meals are pretty much available any time you want them. Breakfasts I liken to a demolition derby with food. People get in the food lines and may or may not have a table. So you will be moving through the line and come up on a person just standing there holding two plates. The issue is that you have no idea which way that person is going to move – or when. The ship had a huge movie screen on the top deck so you could watch movies in the evening. I thought it ironic that the movie of choice while we were anchored in St. Petersburg was “Bridge of Spies.”
Of the cities we visited, I liked Oslo best, followed by Helsinki and Stockholm. The Scandinavian countries had lower population density, lots of water views, and green trees. You realize what a young country the United States is when you travel in Europe. We missed the emperor stage when sovereigns like Catherine the Great built and gilded the palaces with hundreds of rooms. We missed World War II for the most part. Certainly none of the wholesale destruction that visited a lot of the Baltic countries. We missed the medieval knights and their castles. I remember my first trip to England. I was looking at a statue and asked if it was old. Actually it was a Roman statue and yes it was old beyond my appreciation of it. We read about history, Europeans live in it.
It’s good to see other places and other ways of living and it’s always good to come home. Beyond the jet lag and shaking a cold, it’s nice not to be living out of a suitcase. I did miss one thing. The Baltic temperatures ranged from high 60s to low 70s with miniscule humidity readings. That was a treat.
Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. She is a chair of Arts & Culture Nassau, a city commission charged with support of the arts in Nassau County. She serves on FSCJ’s Curriculum Committee for the Center for Lifelong Learning. She is also the chair of the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.