L. and I drove a harrowing 20 minutes to get groceries yesterday.

The most expensive item we bought was an 8-pack of Crodino, a non-alcoholic aperitif I’ve grown fond of, which was €6.25; meanwhile, the litre of red wine for supper was €1.51.

We were billed 2 cents each for the compostable produce bags we placed our onions, peppers, carrots, and cucumbers in. The Italian system for produce-buying seems to universally involve bagging, and then, self-serve, placing each item on an automated scale, selecting a picture of the item from a screen, and sticking the label that spits iout onto the bag.

“Time to dry” is one of the significant limiting factors when you have just five days of press time, especially when multiple layers are involved.

Yesterday, late in the day, the box design evolved to the point where we knew we needed to print solid colours on all the boxes before we slept.

Which is how we found ourselves, ‘round midnight, mixing ink and printing boxes, in the ancient mill building that houses the flatbed press.

The timestamp on the photo of the bell tower I took on my stumble home is 1:26 a.m. A long day, with much accomplished.

Our apartment above the print shop in Serrazzano is heated by a woodstove in the kitchen. We’ve landed in Western Europe during some unseasonably cold weather; nearly everyone we meet tells us that it was so wonderfully warm “just a few weeks ago.” It’s 8°C outside this morning, though, so we’ve got the fire roaring.

It’s our first working day in Serrazzano. After a tour of the shops—printmaking is three floors down from our apartment; letterpress is reached by walking through a labyrinthine set passageways and steps—I set out to acclimate to the letterpress shop by printing something.

Pasted on a wall in Lucca, Italy. From the Movimento per l’Emancipazione della Poesia.

Here, by some miracle of privilege, luck, and tenacity, is the view from our home for the next five days, in Serrazzano, Italy. We are here for a printmaking residency at Two Cents Press.

Here’s me, explaining This Box is for Good to Frank Meeuwsen in the central train station in Utrecht.

We didn’t need Dopplr for Frank to deduce we were in The Netherlands and ping me; from there, a plan was hatched to meet up and hand over four of the hot-off-the-presses Hilversum boxes for Frank to get into his analog social pipeline.

We are on day ten of our European odyssey, and we’ve already cycled in three countries.

Lisa and I used the Malmö city bike scheme to make a run to the art supply store; in Copenhagen we rented bicycles for three of us to ride from the city centre to the Experimentarium science museum; here in Hilversum we rented bikes for three days to commute to and from the printing studio (a plan that contracted yesterday when we woke up to driving rain and no rain gear, and took a cab instead).

In all three cities the infrastructure for bicyclists is awe-inspiring by Charlottetown standards: near-universal completely separate lanes for cars, bicycles, and pedestrians; bicycle parking everywhere; plenty of bicycle repair shops; a sharing and yielding system that appears to work like a ballet.

In each city I achieved a sort of Borg-like flow state as I cycled symphonically in a community of cyclists. I cannot help but think of the late Josh Underday’s dream for an interconnected network of bicycle routes crisscrossing Charlottetown.

It’s easy to get ground down by public (works) intransigence and imagine the dream to be impossible; until you see the dream functioning, in city after city, and realize it simply takes imagination, courage, and tenacity to achieve.

I was sad to hear of the recent death of Sibyl Cutcliffe.While Sibyl was known for many things, including her service on Charlottetown City Council, I knew her as an early web pioneer.

Sibyl acquired a WebTV in the late 1990s—the device was essentially an “Internet terminal” that used a television for display—and used it as her gateway to the web for many years, with a sometimes-tenacious determination that it was all she really needed.

Sibyl was also a kind and open conversationalist who taught me a lot about the city and its history, one of those people along the way who extended a hand toward my acclimation to the Island and its ways.

Deventer is the birthplace of Samuel Holland, who, among other things, led the survey of colonial Prince Edward Island and named Charlottetown. We just passed through on the train from Osnabrück to Hilversum.

I had a similar brush with Deventer in 2014.