If you love to travel, you probably possess a deep appreciation for experiencing new sights, sounds, meeting new people, and perhaps even immersing yourself in a totally different culture. Travel expands the mind and there is so much out there for you to explore.
But how do you document and preserve your travel experiences? Taking photos is sometimes not enough; you want to journal the whole trip in a way that does it justice. The solution is to create your own travel journal, and it is simple to do.
Document your next adventure by documenting your experiences in a travel journal.
If your tickets are bought and you are counting the minutes until you depart, it is the perfect time to plan how you will write your travel journal. You can, of course, do this for trips you have already completed, as long as the experience is still fresh in your memory, so that you can include all of those important details about your travel experience.
Your Journal as a Travel Memoir
When it comes time to write for your travel journal, you may wonder where to begin. It is best to take a notebook or your laptop with you, because a well-written journal captures the experiences in the moment. Write your thoughts as soon as possible about each day’s experience. Here are a few other tips to get you started:
- Take Lots of Notes: It is wise to document all the really important moments, so you can include them in the journal. It is so easy to forget something unless you write it down! Have a small notebook with you at all times to jot down reminders or any special detail you want to remember to include.
Decide if this journal is for you or if you will share with your friends. This could have an impact on what you may want to include in you journaling and it sets the tone for how you write it.
- Choose Your Audience: Decide if this journal is for you or if you will share with your friends. This could have an impact on what you may want to include in you journaling and it sets the tone for how you write it.
- Choose What Experiences to Include: You don’t want to write something the length of War and Peace. Your travel journal should highlight the places and experiences that you will want to remember from your trip when you look back on it 20 years from now. Choose what you think you will want to remember most.
- Making the Journal a Good Read
How your write the journal can either sound like you are listing off your itinerary (kind of boring) or it can take your readers on the journey with you. By all means include a synopsis of your itinerary, but it should expand with details that bring it to life:
- Include your route plotted on a map.
- List and describe some of the people you meet on your journey (include photos of them if you can).
- Describe people places and things in detail. Cuisine is often a big part of travel experiences, so if that is true for your trip, include some description of your meals and take some photos to go with it.
Write the details you wish to remember about your journey down as they happen.
What Not to Do When Travel Journaling
- Don’t use the same words repetitively; search for the right words to describe things as you see them and capture the story of your trip. Avoid listing anything; don’t write “and then we did this, and then I did that”. Take the reader on the journey with you, as if you were telling your best friend about your adventure.
- Include small details about how the destination made you feel. Write about the sounds or aromas, and tap into all that your senses experienced. Include some dialog if there were meaningful or funny conversations you want to remember.Capture the Trip with VisualsThe journal is not complete without visual images. You can sketch some of the buildings you see, or the people you meet, to help store them in your memory. If drawing is not your thing, take numerous, captivating, pictures with your phone or camera to illustrate your journal.
Save your ticket stubs or any unique bottle labels. You can scan them into a PDF document and include them as visual images in your journal.
Publishing your Travel Journal
Once you are back from your trip it is time to preserve your journal. Think it will be hard to do? Think again. Navigating the airports or the road maps you used on your trip was probably more difficult!
With digital bookmaking, you can go online to sites like Bookemon.com, where the process is simple, fast, and fun. The result is a professionally published book that looks straight out of the travel section of your local bookstore. Along with being incredibly easy, it is also affordable enough that you can choose to order extra copies and share your travel journal with friends and family.
First go online and register for a free account with Bookemon, and then pick a template for your book’s layout. Next, upload your content directly from PDF or Word files and then adjust and customize the pages. You design the entire book with a few clicks, from choosing a special font for your written content to adding clip art from the menu of options. Finally, you can upload and edit photos or drawings directly to the pages of your book.
Preserving your experiences in a travel journal can provide you joy many years from now as you read your own thoughts and look back on all the amazing things that you saw throughout your journey.
You will be thankful that you preserved your memories in a way that stands the test of time. Try it out for free. There is no obligation to buy anything unless you choose to purchase affordability priced copies of your journal to share.