Travel Tips
Keeping a Journal
Keeping a journal is a good idea for several reasons. It will help you to re-experience your trips for years to come. It will help you remember interesting things when you want to tell others about your trip. It can remind you where your photos were taken. And it can bring back details to you about particular sights that were interesting and relevant but too complex to mentally store. We found that each day was so rich and full that we sometimes would forget what we had done the day before. (We are very much into experiencing the moment!!)
The main thing to remember is that keeping a journal does not have to be a chore or time-consuming. One of us had been traumatized in an earlier lifetime by the forced exercise of careful, meticulous recording-keeping that actually interfered with experiencing the trip itself. The idea of journaling had become very painful.
It doesn't have to be that way. Just a note or two, a couple lines here and there can give you all the information to reconstruct the memories. We never spent more than ten or fifteen minutes and sometimes only a minute or two jotting down notes to capture a whole day. It was well worth that little bit of effort -- so we highly recommend it.
We each take a small notebook that fits into a pocket. When we take a picture we note when and where it was taken. At the end of the day we often jot down quick notes about that day's travel. The notebook is also useful for asking our guides, travels, etc. to write down their names (so we make certain we have the spelling correct) and perhaps their e-mail addresses. We give them our business card so they can check for pictures of themselves on our travelogue when we return home. We also have the notebook handy in case we want to jot down a verbatim quote from someone in our travel group, our guide, or an instant impression we don't want to lose.
We also keep our itinerary with us and write notes in the margins or anywhere there is space for jogging our memory later. We keep those copies of our itineraries, lists of fellow passengers, brochures, maps and other pertinent information to help us reconstruct the trip.
None of this takes any extra time or energy. And without these aids it is amazing how much is lost in the memory after a trip packed with special moments.
The plane trip home is a good time to write down overall impressions and thoughts about the trip, before reentry back into the routine of life.
And when we come back and reconstruct the trip in our mind, often with the help of travel guides that we use as an aid to make certain our memories are correct, we actually experience the trip more fully than the first time around. In our minds and memory we can linger in one place as long as we want and get to know it more completely -- learn more about its history and culture and people ---rather than shuttling from one place to another. This way the places are not blurred together. Often is isn't until we return home that we fully appreciate where we have been.
Happy traveling. We hope that you found our meanderings useful and that you have many adventures and unexpected surprises along the road in your own journeys.
Godspeed !
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