13 Ideas For Your Travel Journal

A huge part of traveling is gathering memories to look at once the trip is over. If you love looking back on your trips, you should never visit a new place without bringing along a camera and a travel journal. Consider including these items when putting together your travel journal.

13 Ideas for your Travel Journal

1. Matchbooks from restaurants and bars you visited, as well as the lobby of any hotels you stayed at or checked out. If you’re going to use matches at home, pickup two matchbooks so that you can use one and keep the other.

2. Napkins, like cocktail napkins with logos, from restaurants and bars. If you want to remember a particularly good meal, drink or experience, jot down a few keywords that will jog your memory once you’re back home.

3. Postcards from the various towns you visited. You can punch holes in them and create a book. Not sure where you should visit? Learn more about accommodations in Spain.

4. Travel tickets from busses, trains, subways, flights, and events. I’m sure you’d love to remember the time you had while using a private jet card program traveling to breath tasking locations. Also keep your tickets from museums, galleries, movies, and live shows. To help you piece together your trip once you get home, number these items in the order that you gather them. You’ll have an easier time remembering the order of your itinerary this way.

5. Photographs, of course! Take photos of everything from broad landscapes to small details that you don’t want to forget. Print them out and add them to your travel journal to accompany other musings or keepsakes.

6. Tourist maps and brochures from the things you did during your trip. If you plan on returning to the location, keep brochures of activities you didn’t get a chance to do, but want to when you return. You can also hold onto brochures with things you want to remember to do again the next time you visit, if you particularly loved a museum or other attraction.

7. Paper bags from boutiques and shops that you can’t visit anywhere else in the world. One of the best things about visiting a new place is browsing and shopping at the independently-owned stores you won’t be able to visit anywhere else in the world.

8. Sea shells and sea glass from the beach. Attach a small bag to your journal and add a few pieces of treasures from the sand.

9. Candy wrappers from treats that are unique to a specific area of the world. Flatten out the wrappers and tape them to the pages.

10. Business cards from people you meet or places you visit. Not only will these serve as reminders of your trip, but you’ll be able to stay connected with the friends you make along the way.

11. Menus from restaurants, bars or cafes you enjoyed dining at during your trip.

12. Wine bottle labels from bottles you opened with your travel companion or from any bottles you purchased at wineries during your trip.

13. Don’t forget to make actual journal entries! All of these details can’t replace your thoughts and experiences throughout your vacation.

By collecting certain things from your trip, you’ll be able to relive it over and over.

13 Ideas For Your Travel Journal

 

Comments

13 Ideas For Your Travel Journal — 68 Comments

  1. Thanks so very much for the Wonderful Review on 13 Ideas For Your Travel Journal! This is such a terrific idea! I really love this idea! If we take a vacation, like we did last year, I bring my camera and always forget to get it out and use it! I think I only took a few pictures of our “fur babies” at the “dog play area” where we were and when we stopped at Digger’s Dungeon! I don’t know if we will be taking a vacation this year or not, but if we do, I’m definitely going to remember to take more pictures! I also will have to take a journal with me as well! Thanks so much for sharing your wonderful review, the pictures, and your personal and professional opinions on 13 Ideas For Your Travel Journal with all of us! You know that I always enjoy reading your reviews! Thanks again! Michele 🙂
    Michele Ash recently posted..4K Ultra HD In-Store Events Happening Now At Best Buy! #UHDatBestBuyMy Profile

  2. I’m going to New Zealand in the near future and will keep all of theses in mind. Thanks.

  3. These are some great ideas. I would never have thought to do some of these things. Thank you so much for sharing

  4. I save brochures and bags with logos. I also will keep things with a resort names we stay at as well as ticket subs. We also make a point to keep sea shells. Actually we store sea shells in baby wipe containers for the ride home. Never thought of match books and some of the others. Great ideas. Thanks for the ideas

  5. These are all good ideas. Especially for the kids. It can be a sort of vacation scavenger hunt.

  6. I love the idea of the matchbooks. I have seen some really fun matchbooks and they would be fun to collect. I am going to do this! 🙂

  7. I always took brochures since my kids were born. I just hope they enjoy their journals as much as I enjoyed making it for them.

  8. Thanks so much for all of these wonderful ideas! I especially love the idea of saving menus, wrappers, shopping bags, and maps!

  9. These are great tips for creating a travel journal. Thank you for sharing this post.

  10. Love these! Especially #3 – why didn’t I think of it before? 🙂 Gonna do this next time for sure!

  11. Someone once told me a really inexpensive souvenir that they get everywhere they go is a local newspaper! It would be a nice addition to a travel journal: just stick it into the journal or cut out something from it & add it.

  12. I wish I went somewhere on a vacation period! I always enjoy reading about where you go with the family.

  13. Wow so many great ideas that i never would have considered or thought about, the one we always love is the Sea shells.

  14. All wonderful ideas! My mom has a wonderful scrapbook/journal from when she and my dad went to Europe. They saved everything. Even take-out menus from fast-food restaurants in Paris, shopping bags from Harrod’s of London…just about everything you suggest! I hope to be able to travel soon to another State to visit an old friend, and I’m pinning your post as a reminder. Thank you! : )

  15. Lots of great ideas here. Sometimes I felt too tired to write in my journal….but I did it anyway. SO glad I did. Wonderful memories were captured forever.

  16. Always fun to save things from a great trip. Always great to go back & see what a fun time we had!

  17. we use all of these things in our travel journal – plus our custom playlist for each city/attraction! it is such fun to look back on our adventure this way. each item can spark a different memory for each of us.

  18. This is pretty neat! I didn’t even know places still at matchbooks? I haven’t gone on a vacation in a long time, so we’re due before we spit out another baby 😉 love this idea and will save for later, too!

  19. WOW! Excellent ideas! I wish I would’ve read this a couple weeks ago, before I went on my trip to Texas! There were not a lot of things we did, but your tips would’ve made for some really cool memories of things we did do! Love the idea of collecting the matches, cocktail napkins, even the wine bottle labels! FANTASTIC!!!!

  20. What a great idea to make the photo album like you did. I will do that for my next vacation which will be to Las Vegas and a Cruise in November.

  21. I’m so glad to know that I’m not the only one who puts these things into a book so anyone can travel with us after the actual trip is over.

  22. Great ideas I do like to journal when I travel it passes the time when I’m in airports or in route somewhere or have down time at the end of the day

  23. Those are really brilliant ideas. Hubby and I used to collect napkins from the resto where we dine and tickets too! 🙂

  24. I like the items you have chosen.Even a candy wrapper can bring back fond memories of a trip taken. The items saved and looked through later can almost take you right back to the vacation.

  25. These are all great ideas! We have small babies so we haven’t taken a vacation with them yet. But I always try to capture pictures when we do go out, they are memories that will last forever! 🙂

  26. This is such a nice idea to really remember a vacation. Kind of a scrap book of fond memories that can be passed down.

  27. My friend did this for her honeymoon this past year and I think the idea is fantastic. I will be doing a travel journey for ever vacation here on out!

  28. This is a great idea, we’ve done that in the past. We have a couple plastic bags filled with brochures from a couple of our bigger trips, I need to find something to put them in. 🙂

  29. We don’t take regular vacations. I like the idea of keeping a memory book to look back on and share.

  30. I wish I had done this on our last 2 vacations, the first I did create a Shutterfly photo book. i still have to download photos from our 25th Wedding Anniversary for that book. If I had logged everyday it would be much easier. But It would be great to log and keep photos and use those and pictures to create a photo book to keep. Thanks for the great idea.

  31. I love to travel. I take loads of photos and try to write about my experiences every day. I find when I look back on my notes, I’m always reminded of moments I would have otherwise forgotten.

  32. I love the idea of buying postcards and putting holes in them making a book for keepsake

  33. What a wonderful list you have provided us with, I hope to soon take a longer vacation but when I do take a tour I do enjoy grabbing a few of these items.
    @tisonlyme143

  34. What great tips. I used to keep shoeboxes with various vacations mementos. They always brought back such great memories.

  35. We are going to do this summer for our road trip with the grandchildren. This will be something fun for all of us. It will be great for the kids to look back on years from now. Thank you for sharing

  36. We are going on a family trip later this year. I plan on doing a travel journal as we go. This gave me some ideas for extra things to put in there.

  37. I Love these ideas! I am also a true believer in keeping a travel journal. It is so easy to think…”Oh,I’ll remember that!” Thank goodness I forced myself to journal…even when I was dead tired. There are memories saved forever that I know would have been forgotten over the years. So grateful for my friend that introduced me to travel journaling.

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