Why keep a travel journal?

Why I started keeping a travel journal.

I’ve always been a collector during my travels, anytime we went somewhere on a holiday when I was a kid I would come home with a whole bunch of flyers and info brochures about the place that we went to, tickets of the things we did and just all kinds of fun stuff to keep (rocks, foodwrapers, receipts, you name it I kept it all). The habit stayed but later on I also started making photo albums, although this is something you do more after your trip when you get back home (sometimes months or years later). 

For my first big trip, going to canada, I wanted to try something new. I wanted to keep a journal about all the things I was going to do, but also wanted to have a place where I could keep my travel collectables and photo’s! So down the travel journal rabbit hole I went. 

And so when I happend to find myself in a store where they sell all kinds of beautiful notebooks. I bought what was going to be my travel journal. A thick leather bound, blanc page notebook.

Why I love working on this journal 

Whilst I’m writing this blog I’m 4 months into my trip to Canada and so far still going strong with my journal. Although it was after a slow start, I probably started writing in it during the second month of my travels, but ever since then I’ve been adding more and more to it. I’ve learned not to worry about it to much if I skip some time in the journal, it is supposed to be fun and not keep you on a leash. 

Going back through the pages I’ve written till now, has been amazing to see how far I’ve come on this trip and all the things I’ve done and seen in such a short amount of time. I can definitely say that keeping a travel journal works great as a memory bank. It really helps bringing back happy times and revisiting them but also helps you reflect on the things that went wrong or were unpleasant so you can grow from these experiences.