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.

The only device I carried to Europe during our month away was my iPhone SE, a far cry from the days when work necessitated packing a phone, a laptop, a mouse, and an ergonomic keyboard.

This is the first blog post I’ve written with a real keyboard since early April; this has been the longest time I’d been away from a keyboard since in 40 years.

I loved it.

Italy, it seems, is a country that puts up a fuss when we try to enter or exit it.

On the way toward Italy, weeks ago, we got held up in Basel when our night train was late arriving, and we missed our connection.

Basel is not a hard place to have an unexpected layover: we had two good meals and a nice walk before continuing on the next train to Milan.

Today it was our flight from Florence to Munich that was delayed, causing us to miss our onward flight to Toronto. As we had a 6-hour layover in Toronto anyway, we’ve been rebooked on the next flight, and will make it home on the originally-booked flight to Charlottetown. We got to enjoy a lovely meal in the Munich airport—supplemented by €30 in Lufthansa vouchers—rather than waiting out our YYZ purgatory at Tim Hortons.

Because I’m nothing if not a sucker for novel beverages, I ordered a Mezzo Mix to have with my smoked salmon salad; from Wikipedia:

Mezzo Mix is a product of The Coca-Cola Company, first introduced in West Germany in 1973. It is a mixture of orange soda and cola, a beverage popular in German-speaking countries, commonly known there as spezi, the generic trademark of the first brand of that type of soda.

Indeed when the waiter mixed up our order and brought me a Coke by mistake, I had him mutter spezi under his breath. It was… Coke with a hint of orange.

Onward!