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European Wandering
2026
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Michael Kluckner
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Artwork & text © Michael Kluckner, 2026
| Our second trip to Europe this year, the
earlier one to Provence
in February. And perhaps the last to Europe for some time, due to
the crowds and complexity of moving around. Part of the issue was
my lack of research – Oktoberfest had started in Munich (we were
there at the end of September, so, Septemberfest?), which
we didn't want to attend but which made hotels screamingly
expensive, so we rented an airbnb in Haar, an okay little village
but a fair train ride from the centre; Madrid and Zaragoza both
had festivals around the same time, forcing us to move on faster
than we might have done. And I spent a final week in Denmark,
mainly to visit old friends. Our initial plan was to fly from Munich to Bologna, Italy, but we missed our flight due to a breakdown of the S-bahn train in Munich. Later flights to Bologna and nearby Milan were booked solid; to make matters worse, Italian air traffic controllers went on strike that afternoon, cancelling everything. In retrospect, we could have found our way back into central Munich and taken trains across Switzerland to Italy, but instead we decided to catch a plane to Madrid and rethink the trip completely. Truly an example of "Winging It," for better or worse. I was more focused on the sketchbook and pencils on this trip, and finished most of the drawings better than I did on the last few, in my opinion. |
| Above and below: Munich at the beginning of October. The
marvellous city hall on Marienplatz attracted a crowd at midday
for the glockenspiel ringing and the cartoonish dance of figures
high up in the tower. Quite a number of men wore lederhosen, the
Bavarian decorated leather shorts, and women wore pretty
traditional dirndl dresses. Other than the Alte Pinakotech art museum and the Residenz museum – lots of religious painting and royal portraits – the highlight was wandering in the Botanischer Garten and the Englischer Garten – a very large park for a European city – where we unexpectedly came across people surfing a "standing wave" that somehow emerges on the "Eisbach" (a side arm of a river) from underneath the city. "Eisbachwelle," it's called. Later in the trip, when we booked into a hotel in Hallbergmoos near the Munich airport, we came across Surftown Muc, a huge outdoor pool that somehow creates surf and attracts people for its bar and gym as well. Bizarre! |
| Below: when we emerged from the Metro at the Plaza del Sol, the
closest station to Madrid's Plaza Mayor near where we intended to
stay, we were astonished to see the huge plaza covered in tents,
like a giant homeless camp. But the people were camping,
protesting the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal from an
apartment where she'd lived for 70 years. She subsequently died.
Housing affordability and tenants' rights re-emerged into the
spotlight. Wikipedia has a good
overview. Elsewhere in Spain we saw similar encampments,
along with marches and protest gatherings. |
| Below on the left: almost every drawing contains people looking
at their phones. It is the one inevitable obligatory human pose
for the travelling sketcher. Madrid's botanical garden adjoins the
fabulous Museo del Prado, which I have been to a couple of times
in the past (and there was a lineup of 200 or so people to get in
on a Saturday, so it stays just as a memory). On the right: the Plaza Mayor, ringed by outdoor cafés, is one of the great public spaces on the planet. We stayed in a hotel (the Plaza Mayor) a block to the north of it, the same place we stayed on an earlier trip in 2008. |
| Above: an earlier trip in
2008. Below: we would have stayed longer in Madrid but our hotel was booked solid, so we got on the train to Zaragoza. At the bottom right, musing on the idea of doing a travel-sketching how-to. And musing in a grumpy way about Renfe, the Spanish train system, which seems to have replaced most of its humans with scarcely intelligible ticket machines (it's not alone in that), and the screeching sound of metal chair legs on stone floors in the station café. |
| Below: We spent several days in Zaragoza, a wonderful small city
of pedestrian streets, cafés, a Goya Museum, and the astonishing
Plaza del Pilar. The basilica on the river edge is so
picturesque that I violated my usual rule about not drawing
complex architecture. |
| Below: after about 5 days, including a visit to the
extraordinary Emoz
(museum and school of origami), we moved on to Lleida (its Catalan
name, Lérida in Spanish), half way between Zaragoza and Barcelona,
and enjoyed its compact layout and the wonderful hilltop
fort/cathedral semi-ruin. So much history, of Roman and Moor
invasions, of the Knights Templar, constant massacres and battles,
leading up to the 20th century and the fort's use as a military
camp during the Spanish civil war. And finally, it's restoration. |
| Below: there is very little street homelessness compared with
North American cities such as my Vancouver. A few beggars, and
fairly typically one or two will wander through a sidewalk café
asking for change, but the society appears in much better balance
than Canada or the USA. That said, the issue of affordable rents
and evictions galvanized the country, as mentioned above, and
concurrently in mid-October riots over education funding, housing
and general disaffection paralyzed Paris and Milan. |
| Below: I left the warmth of southern Europe for Denmark and
spent a week, largely with friends who'd lived there for more than
20 years. Not a lot of time for drawing and, to be honest, little
that was terribly inspiring compared with Spain. The couple of
days I spent alone in Ribe, a little town on the west coast of
Zealand, were slightly more interesting. It has a river running
through it that creates almost the level of turbulence of Munich's
Eisbach. |
| This travel-drawing experience once again made me wonder if I
could inspire others, and on the train on the 3-hour journey back
to Copenhagen I began to scribble notes in my daytimer. A woman
who vaguely reminded me of the aging Joni Mitchell sat across from
me, chatted a little but was soon asleep, absolutely still, and I
quickly drew her, not wanting to be seen doing it, like in the final
drawing of the Provence trip on the TGV back to Paris. Will anything come of the idea of an "Art on the Road" book? Stay tuned. |
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