I’d long assumed that the only way to enter accented characters on a Mac keyboard was remembering the arcane series of key combinations required for each one. How many times have I typed Malm and then “Option + U, O” to get the ö to make Malmö?

It turns out that, in the modern era, it’s much much easier, as Apple documents here:

In an app on your Mac, press and hold a letter key on the keyboard—for example, a—to display the accent menu.

It works:

Toward the end of our month away I got reflective, and occasionally found myself in a “I need to document all this so I don’t forget!” This rough outline map of our travels was one of those times.

Across the piazza from Bar San Martino is Bar-Pizzeria San Martino. I sat there having a coffee on our last morning in Gubbio, ignoring the ancient church across the way and focusing on the lovely post box instead.

Once we entered the maelstrom of printing, first in Hilversum and then, the next week, in Serrazzano, I fell out of my daily sketching practice, and only picked it up the following week, in the Italian town of Gubbio. One morning I went for coffee by myself at Bar San Martino.

April 17 was an all-day travel day for us, taking trains from Copenhagen to Hilversum, via Hamburg and Osnabrück. It was a long day, with some bumps along the way, but we made it.

We spent April 15 and 16 in Copenhagen. Lisa had never been, and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see at least a little of the city (I would never turn down an opportunity; it’s one of my favourite cities).

We started with coffee at Prolog Meatpacking, rented bicycles from Rosenborg Cykler, cycled to the Experimentarium (see also my trip there with Olivia), and finished up with burgers at Halifax.

Our Airbnb in Malmö was bright and airy and well-equipped. Our time there is coated with a layer of jet laggy foggy memories. I made this sketch on our last morning.

On Sunday in Malmö, we gathered with Luisa, Olle, Nene, and Loe at Luisa’s studio at Blå Huset for a bookbinding bee. More details on our This Box is for Good site.

The second sketch in the travel series: lunch out at Thai Thim in Malmö, followed by coffee at Beans & Tales, an outing inspired by Gong Bao Thursdays of old here in Charlottetown. It was good to be steeped in unfettered nerdom for awhile.

I made a bunch of sketches in my notebook while we were away in Europe from April 11 to May 11, and I scanned them all this morning for posting here. As such, they fall outside the travel timestream. Here’s the first, sketched after a lovely night out at Two Forks in Malmö.