Sunday, August 21, 2011

Travel Journal

TA DA! I crossed something off my To Do list! 

I have always wanted to be someone who keeps a journal, but have never quite been able to.  I decided that our trip to Europe & Morocco would be the perfect time to journal my experiences and observations.  I won't lie, there isn't a lot of real introspective thought throughout my moleskin, but I was able to track all of our spending, what sites we saw, people we met (and their names!), and my basic emotions/reactions to things. 
Here is an AWFUL cell phone pic of our Rome budget 
I also found it quite useful to keep a journal on a backpacking trip so I could write down addresses, reservations numbers, and site information.  On a one or two week trip it may be easier to have all that printed out in advance, but since we were booking on the go, having one tidy place to keep all our important notes and information was quite handy. 

Also, our trip was on a tight budget (more about the actual costs later...) so I would literally write down how much we spent on every meal, stamp, etc.  It was this habit that actually caused us to stop buying and sending so many postcards.  Between our family and friends, it was adding up quite quickly. I also had this romantic notion of buying and sending ourselves a postcard from every location.  Though I did buy one, I stopped sending them once the ~1-1.80 Euro began adding up. 

This also helped us remember the little things that you sometime forget after one long blur of a trip, like what we ate the night we got engaged or the names of little churches we saw. 

I highly recommend keeping a travel journal, whether to record your thoughts and observations, or rather just to have a log of what you did, how much you spent, and of course(!) what you ate.

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