Travel2CityA notebook of journeys
Home / Travelling together / The Long Way Round
Spain · A shared notebook

The Long Way Round

A doorway, a pattern, a pause

Read the illustrated story ↓
Colombine, Mea Zen and Lu Cia climb a shaded stone passage toward sunlight in Granada

I had drawn a sensible line through Spain. It was the kind of line that promised we would see everything, miss nothing, and arrive with enough time to be pleased with ourselves. Colombine looked at it for a while. Then she drew a small door in the margin.

Lu Cia said nothing. She had found an actual doorway, with a little light on the other side. We folded the map. Over the next pages, the sensible line acquired a few bends.

An imagined travel story with Mea Zen, Colombine MichelangeLove and Lu Cia, inspired by original Travel2City photographs. Shared moments, dialogue and weather belong to the fiction.

01—04

A doorway, a pattern, a pause

Colombine, Mea Zen and Lu Cia climb a shaded stone passage toward sunlight in Granada
01
Granada

The passage was narrow enough to make us walk one behind another. For once, my map could not tell me more than my feet. Lu Cia paused where the shade ended. Colombine called it a doorway worth drawing. I turned back and decided that being a little behind was an excellent place to look.

Open archive photograph
Lu Cia, Mea Zen and Colombine look and sketch beneath the red and cream arches in Córdoba
02
Córdoba

Under the repeating arches, we grew quiet without agreeing to. I tried to count them and lost my place. Colombine drew just one, then stopped to look again. Lu Cia tilted her face toward the light. In my notebook, I replaced a number with a curve. It seemed more useful.

Open archive photograph
Lu Cia offers pastries as Mea Zen and Colombine laugh together on a blue and yellow tiled bench in Seville
03
Seville

I announced that we had fallen behind the plan. Lu Cia opened the pastry bag as if this were precisely what the plan required. Around us, the tiled bench offered more patterns than Colombine could fit on a page. We stayed until the crumbs were gone. I did not record how long that took.

Open archive photograph
Mea Zen writes at a stone overlook with Lu Cia and Colombine beside her and Toledo beyond
04
Toledo

From the overlook, the city gathered itself into a shape small enough to hold in our eyes. Colombine closed her sketchbook. Lu Cia leaned on the warm stone. I wrote the list of things we had missed, crossed it out, and began again with the things that had found us.

Open archive photograph
One last line

That evening I opened the map again. The route looked less impressive than the day had felt. I put a tiny door beside the next destination and left the rest in pencil.

“We took the long way round. The notebook thanked us.”
Mea’s notebook · The Long Way Round
More pages together

The notebook keeps growing.

Follow another small story with Mea, Colombine and Lu Cia.

Lu Cia, Mea Zen and Colombine with a map outside the Bratislava theatre

Three companions, one notebook

Where our shared pages begin
Lu Cia sets down coffee while Mea Zen and Colombine sit beneath the stepped gables of Bruges

A Pocketful of Weather

Belgium & The Netherlands · Four illustrated moments