April 6th, 2026

Good morning friends,

     My tremendous solo voyage has officially come to an end. As a rude reminder, a young uniformed official at the airport in Amsterdam, upon checking my passport, reprimanded me for overstaying my welcome in the EU by three days. You are only allowed to be there for 90 days in a calendar year, so I guess my European travel is restricted until the year 2027. At any rate, after spending a glorious week with Julie and Jose and Rose and my little granddaughter Talia, we all flew back from Amsterdam to Toronto and spent the night near the airport. We drove back to Rochester and eventually to the Schnepf family home where we spent the the night after having a great Easter feast prepared by our son Benjamin. As I go through my pictures over the next few weeks I will post some more thoughts about the trip. At this point, the main idea rolling around in my head is that, in America we talk about history in terms of centuries, but in Europe they speak in terms of millennia….it is a completely different perspective, sometimes resulting in ambiguity about the future and other times being "spot on" in terms of how they interpret current events. 

  Today I’m going to head to the store for a bit just to catch up with Ryan and Sam and whoever is working today. Julie and are actually going to take a trip in the next couple of weeks down to the Virginia area to purchase a collection of instruments. If anyone has anything please contact the store and we’ll make you an offer or we’ll pick things up to sell for you. I also want to thank the entire staff for providing me the opportunity to take this extended leave of absence and for all the hard work they did while I was gone. The store has never been in better hands.

With peace,

John Bernunzio 

Houses along the canal