5 Tips for Journaling Your Travels

How do you commemorate your travels?  Photos, videos, postcards, and souvenirs are all ways to preserve memories.  You can look at them and remember all of your adventures visually…but what about journaling?  Have you considered the benefits of a written account of your travels? 

Yes it takes time and effort, but we promise it is so worth it.  Written stories of daily victories and defeats, inspired poems and accounts, drawings and scribbles from incessant boredom, random hilarious quotes from others, tickets and mementos of places visited are all parts of journaling!  At Skycraft, our video production crew is always traveling around the world for various filming projects. Here are some of our tips to help your travels stay alive through time.

1.) GET A JOURNAL

When choosing a journal, be sure to select one that suits your travelling style.  For example, if you are backpacking you may want to choose a smaller size that has flexible binding.  If you are travelling with a suitcase, you have more freedom of choice as to the size and cover of your journal. A good time to journal is during a layover. Our friends over at All The Rooms have put together a great article about what to do during a layover. 

2.) SAVE TICKETS, MAPS, & SMALL BROCHURES

Plane tickets, train tickets, and admission tickets are all ways to preserve memories.  Most have a time and date stamp.  A glance at those tickets can spark various memories.  Maps are great references during a trip to help you along and after a trip to show exactly where you were.  Brochures are also a great way to remember a location that you visited.  Those brochures can give details about the excursion you went on and remind you about the little things during the trip.

3.) BRING PENS AND TAPE (OR GLUE STICKS)

Bringing pens is obvious, but why the glue sticks and/or tape?  All those tickets, maps and brochures you saved can now be a part of your journal with some glue or tape!  As you are journaling about the amazing visit to the castle, glue in the admission ticket.  It’s a subtle touch that will add to your future nostalgia.  It is also fun to share these little mementos with others as they are frequently accompanied with entertaining stories.

4.) MAKE THE TIME

For many, making the time to journal is the hardest part.  Allow yourself time each day, ten minutes, to write about your experiences.  It can doesn’t have to be a lengthy narrative.  You can write a list of everything that went wrong that day.  You can sketch or write poems about people, places, and events.  If you make the time, you will feel fulfilled at that moment, and even more so when you are rereading your journal ten years later.  

5.) TAKE ADVANTAGE OF BOREDOM

If you are struggling to make time every day, then take advantage of your boredom or mundane periods of time.  That long train ride, that short flight, that hopefully not-so-bumpy bus ride…those are times to journal!  I’ve started so many entries apologizing to myself for the sloppiness because of whatever mode of transportation I was on!  Get a nice journaling session in and then take that well deserved nap!

Unfortunately memories fade, however, written accounts remain.  Rereading your adventures years later will inspire smiles, joy, and laughter.  Trust us, if you take time to journal, your future self will thank you.