One of the best things about travelling is recording your adventures. I know most people are like me and come home from a holiday and spend many months printing out and scrapbooking their travels. I used to find this exciting but also a bit frustrating as you inevitably forget a key detail like “what was the name of that cute little café in…???” Or worse still, and, yes, sadly this has happened to me – you lose ALL the photo’s you took on your amazing holiday due to a storage drive failure. Fortunately, on this occasion, I had already documented our trip whilst we were travelling, if I hadn’t those memory reminders would be lost forever. The fact that all the photo’s I hadn’t already printed and put into my travel journal are lost forever still upsets me to this day. But it does make my completed travel journal all that more precious.
To this day many of the journals I had great intentions of completing once I got home, remain unfinished for one reason or another including the fact that before they were done our next holiday would come around and I would be off on our next adventure and collecting new memories to document. I have many travel journals/scrapbooks that are incomplete with photo’s not printed or are sitting in a box somewhere collecting dust as time and life gets away from you.
Now before I go on holiday, I prepare a travel journal specifically for the trip. Whilst travelling I use the “wasted time” to document each day. By “wasted time” I mean time spent sitting at the airport waiting for my flight, or evenings in the hotel room resting from the day’s adventures. By putting some pre-travel thought into the supplies I take I can very easily document my travels and have the whole thing finished BEFORE I even get home.
Nowadays, I do a mixture of art and scrapbooking whilst I am travelling. I love taking photos and including them in my travel journal along with the bits and pieces (ephemera) I collect along the way. But I also love sketching and creating art on the go. So now, my travel journals are made to accommodate these two creative processes. Of course, it has evolved over the years, one of my first travel journals was basically just a scrapbook as I hadn’t re-discovered my love of art at the time.
