Travel enables you to explore the world and keeps you inspired. It also provides you with a perspective of yourself.
As soon as you get home, you probably have hundreds of photos that will quickly wind up forgotten.
Is there a way to wind down and make the travel experience much more meaningful? Can you capture these experiences in a more profound, much more personal manner?
Yes, there is! You can organize your mementos and have something to return to when you start a travel journal.
1. Prepare all the essentials
Purchase a lightweight but durable travel journal with a hardcover.
It should also be highly compact so that you could safely carry it with your things wherever you go.
It would help if you also packed writing essentials such as pens, pencils, and markers. That way, it will be easier to keep your things organized while you’re traveling.
Choose pens that you’re comfortable writing with. The same thing goes with markers and other journaling materials. You might also need to use a glue stick or scissors to trim down cards and tickets when placing these in your journal.
That way, you can journal to your heart’s content.
2. Try to write every day
It will be a lot easier to remember things if it’s still fresh from your brain. So, when traveling, try to write as much as you can in your travel notebook.
Although some of your journal entries don’t have to be that long, try to highlight what you feel at that moment.
What are your thoughts after visiting a local market? Did you get to learn something new from your experiences? What did the view on top of a mountaintop feel like?
3. Add pictures and sketches
No trip will ever be complete without photos. These usually help you remember what you saw or what you did, making it a visual reminder of your journey.
Digital cameras now make it more accessible these days to take high-quality photos, and you can delete images that you don’t like anyway.
You might also want to draw buildings or landmarks that let you capture particular details of your trip. These sketches will allow you to remember significant points later on.
4. Use it as a scrapbook
You might also want to try gluing stuff that you’ve gathered from your most recent adventures. Some excellent examples are bottle labels, ticket stubs, postcards, foreign dollar bills, candy wrappers, and so on.
Whatever you find interesting, paste them in! That way, you’ll have a thick book filled with memories to look into.
5. Write about your trip after you leave
It also makes sense that you write something about your trip after you leave.
It also helps that you ask yourself these questions:
- What was the trip like?
- What are the things you learned?
- What particular experience surprised you?
- What are the things that disappointed you?
You must reflect on your travels as soon as you’re back home. That way, you can apply these things to your future adventures.
This is also an excellent way to know more about yourself, other people that you’ve traveled with, and the ways that you can grow.
Use this as you try to get to see the bigger picture. You might be surprised!
In Conclusion
Starting a travel journal does not need to be fancy. What’s important is that you do whatever floats your boat and follow these tips to get started:
- Prepare all the essentials
- Try to write every day
- Add pictures and sketches
- Use it as a scrapbook
- Write about your trip after your leave
When you follow these above mentioned tips, you can have a keepsake of your trips that you can come back to.
