Capture Your Travel Memories With Journaling
I’ve kept a travel journal for years. Whenever I pack for a trip, whether it be abroad, or just a little ways down the road, it’s the first thing I dig out. Looking back on the journals I’ve kept from years gone by, I remember trips I took, days I enjoyed and the feeling of being where I was, even if I can’t consciously remember it all the time.
Keeping a travel journal is like keeping a time capsule of memories and experiences to enjoy months and years later.
In this post we’ll go over tips on how to use a travel journal to capture your precious travel memories.
Keep your travel journal with you
Don’t leave it in the hotel room. Take your journal everywhere with you and jot down every stray experience you have. Look for it, and you’ll find plenty of pockets of time to document your adventures, rather than snatching a few minutes at the end of the day when sleep calls.
Long travel hours on planes, trains and automobiles are perfect for gathering your thoughts about your experiences.
Waiting at a restaurant for your food? Get your travel journal out.
Realxing at the beach? Jot down how you’re feeling.
Describe what you’re experiencing right there and then, while its fresh in your mind. Future you will thank you for the memories.
Travel junk journal spreads
Junk Journaling is a type of journaling that is a lot like scrapbooking. We find scraps from our daily lives - from receipts to magazine pages to photos - and put them together in a journal to tell a story.
Having junk journal spreads in your travel journal is a great and visual way to capture your memories.
If you look for it, you will find there is always scraps of stuff to put in your journal, especially when travelling. My own travel journal is filled with restaurant receipts, plane boarding passes, airport bus tickets, airport parking tickets, business cards, postcards, tourist brochure cut outs, polaroid pictures, coffee cup sleeves and more.
If it can be stuck down, it’s going in the journal.
The result is something I can look back on years later as a visual reminder of where I was and what I saw. Will I remember a bar I went to in Majorca three years ago, a decade from now? Probably not, but open my travel journal to its business card and I can remember exactly where I was sitting in that bar with my best friend.
Sketch and if you’re not artisitc, use your senses
Like junk journaling, quick sketches of your travels will bring the memory even more to life, years later.
From beach views, cityscapes, to sketches of the hills, take a few minutes to sit and quickly sketch what you’re seeing.
If, like me, you’re not particularly talented in art, use your senses instead. What can you see, hear, smell, taste, touch.
List it out
I love writing an itinerary from my trips and filling the page around it with scraps of memories found and pictures taken.
You can write the date and list out every place you went on each day, or find a local map and draw a line of the journey you took. What you’re left with is a guide to your trip, especially for trips where you packed a lot of activities in.
Together we’ve gone through how to journal to capture your travel memories, from creating junk journal spreads to writing your itinerary in a creative way. Want to dive deeper into journaling but are unsure where to start, read my journal prompts perfect for complete beginners.
