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!

We arrived in Copenhagen exactly a month ago. As I write we’re in the very pleasant sun-filled cafeteria of the tiny airport in Florence, preparing for the flights that will see us get home to Charlottetown in 20 hours.

Last night in Florence was stunningly beautiful: warm, windless, with the sliver of the Moon over the river. We had one last meal—pizza, a few doors up the street—and then walked 15 minutes for one last gelato.

This morning has gone remarkably well, given the number of branches on my scenario planning tree. I booked us a taxi for 7:00 a.m. The taxi arrived at 7:00 a.m. The driver, Oliver, was kind and helpful and we learned a lot from him; he altered our route to go through the park (“same cost, same time”) and we arrived at the airport at 7:18 a.m.

We now enter the rarified atmosphere of intercontinental travel; home is far enough away right now that it’s inconceivable that I’ll be sleeping in my own bed tonight. But—touch wood—I will.

Lisa and I carved out a tiny perfect hour together this afternoon at a tiny bar cum secondhand bookstore on Via dei Renai here in Florence. As we sat inside and watched life flow by, I had a moment to catch my breath and realize how thankful, how privileged, I am to have a loving coconspirator like Lisa to enter into adventures like this.

I am an overseas customer, a follower, and fan of Frab’s, the magazine shop in the Italian town of Forlì, an eponymous effort of Anna Frabotta.

I came across Frab’s on the same route I encountered Edicola518 in Perugia, and when it became apparent that our journey from Numana to Florence via Bologna was going to take us within spitting distance, Lisa knew enough to know that, even though the shop was closed today, I’d want to make a pilgrimage. So we did.

Forlì, it turns out, is a nice town in its own right, compact, filled with bicycle paths, and sporting a lovely town square. Frab’s is just off the square.

The shop—from the outside looking in—seemed everything I imagined it to be. I hope someday to return during opening hours.

While we could take only pictures, there was a helpfully This Box is for Good-sized letterbox at the ready, so we were able to leave something of ourselves behind at least.