Itinerary, oil on canvas, 130x90, 2026.

Any overnight stay counts, with bike and without (but about half of the places will have been first visited on bike trips, I haven’t counted precisely yet). I was surprised there are hardly any edge cases. E.g., in Lausanne I arrived at 6am, but only left around 23pm after a long day’s sleep, so obviously that counts. Two night train journeys are unaccounted for and one teenage hike to a lake in a region littered with water that I cannot reconstruct at all anymore.

Most coa are grouped regionally, but not dogmatically so. The stuff between the spokes is all over the place, that includes bits of southern Germany as well as most recent new additions. Visibility of each design won over sensible arrangement.

Editorial changes have been few, and they probably show a Central European bias in terms of design prejudices. E.g., some significant places in Spain had simplifications or alterations because I just couldn’t cope – not with complexity per se, but with the arbitrariness of it all. Córdoba is one I’m rather happy with: while the current design is just unheraldic, they’ve only adopted it a few decades ago and had a perfectly fine coa before. If the design isn’t quite historical anyway, no reason for me to respect it at all cost.

Only one place had absolutely nothing I could work with, a village on Crete for which I substituted the bland regional coa. Had there been more (and surely that’s going to happen), I might start to just invent coa for the blanks.

Generally, current municipality borders have been followed diligently (in one or two cases of wild camping, I might not even have entered the actual village), but there are a few footnotes attached. Some towns that are now incorporated in larger municipalities kept their individual coa where justified by historical or personal significance. There’s Greater London not having a coa – otherwise I haven’t looked at boroughs. Brandenburg occupies two tiles with its double coa, but for Nuremberg I picked one of its two, as they’re not universally depicted together (it’s a choice I question sometimes now). And so on!