How to Keep a Travel Journal: Tips for Documenting Your Trip
Why Keep a Travel Journal?
If you want to make the most of your travels abroad, we recommend keeping a travel journal. Journaling enhances the lessons of travel. You get the chance to reflect on the various aspects of travel in your own voice and keep track of the experiences you’ve had across different cultures. It’s also great for memory retention: Ever studied for a test with the notes you’ve written versus solely what you’ve absorbed orally in class? There’s a difference!
If you’re new to the concept, let the ACIS Educational Tours team share a few tips for creating a travel journal and filling it with your incredible trip memories.
Choosing the Right Travel Journal Format
There’s more than one way to keep a travel journal, so you have to decide what method fits you best.
You could go with the classic notebook. These are great for scrapbooking and saving physical mementos you pick up along your trip, such as boarding passes and museum tickets. Each journal you fill becomes a treasure in itself that you can look forward to revisiting.
Moving beyond the traditional notebooks and moleskins, the digital age has opened up the possibilities for journaling. Consider starting a travel blog or posting regular reflections on social media. It’s an effective way to share your travels in real time with friends and family who are eagerly awaiting updates back home. There are also now apps such as Journey that are specifically designed to capture travel memories, and even include geo-tagging features so you can pinpoint your thoughts to an exact location.
What to Include in Your Travel Journal
So, paper or digital, you’ve got your journal format. What are you going to fill it with?
Everyone will have different priorities for their trip, so what’s included will be specific to your interests. For food lovers, names and menu items from amazing meals are a must, while the art aficionados might want to save every museum map.
No matter your interests, here are a few pro tips on journal inclusions:
- As you collect items, write down the meaning on the back in case any get separated from your initial entry.
- Take time to add personal reflections about the daily sights, sounds, and interactions you have. Include emotional states. How did you feel seeing your favorite painting for the first time in person?
- Include the highlights but also note the challenging parts of the trip. Were there times you felt homesick? Did you experience any culture shock that altered your perspective on the world? What was something that made you equal parts happy and sad?
- Give yourself quick, fun prompts. If you choose to use an app, many of them have prompts built-in to the design. Here are some ideas:
- “The tastiest thing I ate today”
- “A conversation I won’t forget”
- “A funny thing happened in transit”
- “The best thing that happened today and the worst”
How to Make Journaling a Habit While Traveling
Set out with the intention of journaling once a day so that even if your schedule changes, you have an easy goal in mind. For any educators bringing students on an ACIS Tour, we often see journaling time at the end of the day as an effective way for everyone to unwind and reflect. Long stretches on the bus between cities and countries are also an optimal time to jot down thoughts.
As you go through your day, you can make it easier on yourself by gathering materials you’ll use for your more intensive journaling moment:
- Create voice memos and capture emotions in real time
- Use shorthand notes to expand upon later
- Take lots of pictures
- Save stubs and paper items
The Benefits of Reflecting on Your Travel Journal Later
As mentioned previously, the journals themselves can become a kind of souvenir. Each entry brings you back to a specific place and time, and as you get older, you can travel back to those places through the voice of your younger self. Find out what has changed about you from that time, and what became part of you that is still the same.
Hopefully, keeping a travel journal will inspire you to travel more and keep journaling throughout your life!
Kick off a travel journal on your next adventure with ACIS! We’ll take care of all of the logistics, from hotels and food to tour guides and transport, so you can focus on the experience abroad.
Sarah Bichsel
