Travel Journal

At a younger age when I traveled my 3 priorities after taking care of the transportation and hotel were a) Tours b) Souvenirs c) Food, you read correctly, souvenirs over food, I could go on with one meal and a couple of snacks a day just to have extra money left to purchase something that would remind me forever of the trip. I’ve moved Food to priority b, not for my health, but because traditional gastronomy is part of getting to know a new place, so now when I return home the extra pounds are not in my suitcase ;) I still bring back souvenirs, but most of them are Ticket Stubs, Brochures, Postcards and any other type of memorabilia that will help me document my trip. I found that adding these to layouts did not look that good and there was no point of hiding them in an envelope or sticking them behind the layout just for reference, also it was very hard for me to document my vacations in 12X12 pages.

As many of you I get loads of inspiration reading blogs, and one of my favorite bloggers is Amy Tan, she once posted about a Travel Journal and I was fascinated with the idea, HERE is an example of a travel journal she made.

I’ve made three already and I’m hooked for life, this one is from my last vacation, I’ll share half of it with you because I do not want to fill up this post with photos ;)

For the body I used a Martha Stewart clear plastic binder, I have a lot of memorabilia from this trip and needed a very resistant cover to hold all of it The first page is my journal cover; I used a postcard of this beautiful city for the title. I still plan on making layouts about my favorite vacation moments, but I have a lot of photos that wont make it to a layout, I added a bunch of those to this journal, that way I wont have many repeated photos on two different albums.

Most of the pattern paper I used is from Studio Calico, I also got my binder of small scraps out to add some border punched layers.

I didn’t want to make the pages too fat so I kept the embellishing simple: ribbon, brads, clips, staples, flairs, stickers and the most important embellishment Journal Tags, because for me the journaling is very important, I want to always remember every detail of this amazing vacation.

We were so lucky that my cousin Nestor knows the city and its history very well; we practically had our very own private tour guide. I was able to add a lot of interesting journaling about the city because I took video of the tours he gave us.

To save space some of the pages open to reveal more photos and journaling.

I still have to accomplish making these journals during the vacation, the advantage of doing that is that the memories are fresh and it is easier to add the journaling, if you don’t have time for that you can do what I do: carry a small notebook to write down things you do not want to forget, keep an envelope or small binder in your suitcase to have the memorabilia you start to collect in one place, if you want to be even more organized you can separate them by day with a paperclip, I also write down the dates or any important information behind ticket stubs, if I get a business card from a restaurant I write behind it what I ate or sometimes I just take a picture of the menu, take pictures of everything that can help you re-live a day like the name of a museum or a tour boat.

Finally let me share THIS amazing project from Sandy Ang I plan on putting all the videos I took on a DVD and add them to this journal in that cool way.

I think this has been the largest post I have ever done, I hope you don't mind my chatty side and I especially hope I was able to inspire you to make a travel journal about your next vacation.

Have a wonderful day!

=Di