Thoughts on Travel Journalling
Anytime is a good time to journal, but when you’re traveling and experiencing new things and making all sorts of memories, it’s especially meaningful. And fun! Because you naturally accumulate more things to glue or tape in your journal, like train tickets, receipts, business cards, packaging, and before you know it, your journal is bulging with pieces of your travels along with your stories.
When I travel, I find it’s all so much stimulation and overwhelming and exhausting, and it can be easy to just crash at night, but making the time to take a few minutes, even in the middle of the day at a cafe or picking up take out and eating dinner at your hotel so you have time to relax while writing, goes a long way.
And it’s so worthwhile: You will never regret it. You will never regret having taken the time to write more about who you were and where you were and why you were while you were gone. Even a couple of days later, time is slippery and outside of your routines, it can be easy to forget what you did or where you ate. And certainly in six months, or a year, or a decade, you can always look back on photos, but to have the words that you write while you were on the train, or after a hike on a mountain, or at night after a bowl of ramen, is something you can give yourself only while out there. Even if you never read them again, just the physical notebook itself is a souvenir holding all of your memories and adventures within.
It can take time and effort to record the details of a day’s trek from breakfast to getting lost on the subway to the hole in the wall local stationery shop, but maybe even more meaningful to write about are when you have a chance to think about who you are outside of your home, the people you meet, the people you’re traveling with. You are a different person in a new country, in a new place. Your habits and your days and your diet change and change you. You learn a lot about yourself, and it’s not always pretty, but it’s a gift.
It’s a privilege and a gift to travel, to go somewhere new, to open your perspectives and to give yourself a new language and layer to who you are, and you never come back the same. Life! Life is, maybe, taking the chance to see just a tiny bit of the world that’s out there. It’s sometimes tough, cultural differences and language barriers and cockroaches and mosquitoes and exhaustion and loneliness, but it’s all richness that goes into the soup.
And hopefully there’s a bit of joy in it as well. The little silly things are maybe some of the best parts of the journey! Write it all down. Taste it twice.
Related Posts
Some of My Favourite Desk Tools
Some of us are working from home more than usual. While the fountain pen...
Currently Inked
I’ve mostly been using the shop tester pens, but after seven weeks of it...
On the Desk
These days have been looking a bit different from what they usually look...
Comments
Lisa R-R said:
Yes I agree – I try to note where the delicious green onion danish was made in a huge round metal pan in an open-air breakfast place,
or where I saw a beautiful fruit stand,
or which bus passed the bird market …
and which were the best noodles (or coffee) of the week.
Stamp away! Add those stickers.
In Italy I needed to track the gelato flavours.
I like to track how far I walked each day too.
So much fun to make the most of the travel journal.
Enjoy Taiwan!
———
Wonder Pens replied:
All of the details! And sometimes that open-air breakfast place isn’t there when you return years later, and it’s all the more special that you got to experience it before.
I am LOVING all the Taiwan stamps! What an adventure just to collect them, and they add so much to the pages. It really is so fun to add in all the details when travelling. Thanks for all of your Taiwan advice!
Nina said:
Do you have any suggestions for travel writing prompts? I want to journal more when I travel, but I feel like I get stuck just going through what I did without properly capturing the essence and emotion and full experience of the day. It reads more like an itinerary, full of fact but lacking in – something – evocativeness perhaps? I want what I write to transport me back to where I was when I wrote it. I’m sure I mostly need practice, but I would love to hear if you’ve ever struggled with not knowing how to capture your travels in words, or if you have any advice for beginners staring at that fresh notebook at the beginning of an adventure, completely unsure of how to make the most of it.
Thank you for your delightful blog! Your words are always an inspiration to me.
———
Wonder Pens replied:
I will share a blog post with some travel writing prompts soon!
I know exactly what you mean: the days are so long that it feels not quite like a chore, but a lot just to even get all the details of the day down. It can hard to capture an experience that’s so different from our daily lives, which is maybe why it’s even more meaningful to try and do so. I will write more soon! But I also think if you have that urge to look deeper, you will find it. Taking the time to sit and soak it all up is always where it begins.
Pam said:
A quick note while I have my coffee and look at your post. I can’t adequately convey the level of joy and comfort I feel when I read your posts and see your photos. I am sure many people have told you, “You should write a book.” Please add me to that list of people. Your writing is so gently nuanced and it sings, it sings, so evocative. Yeah. And the photos! The little feet. My husband who does not have the stationary supply fetish asked is the baby okay at the nursery school now? Ha! Because I MADE him read that blog post. I love your piles of library books. I love your calmness and how your nurture hope. I love how you capture light in your photos. I love how you notice and delight in the little miracles that are in each day. I wish I could buy all the things in your store or at least GET to your store one day and see it. The things I have from your place I treasure. I am currently obsessed with the Life Noble Pad and a glue I got from you. I used it to put a felt pad on the chair leg and it’s the only glue that held, haha, kid’s glue! Hahaha. Okay, the day beckons. Thank you for taking us on this trip. Thank you for being soft morning light in a world that is so battered and fractured. Thank you for reminding us what matters and stocking and showing us all the cool stuff. I am forever grateful.
Pam
———
Wonder Pens replied:
What a gift it is, your words and your thoughts and the time you took to carve them out. Thank you so much for following along with us, for reading and laughing, but mostly for seeing what you do. Always, it seems, just like when I’m starting a new project for the shop or am cooking dinner for the kids, writing this blog feels like I am just putting things out into the universe and sprinkling fairy dust/cat hair on it all, and hoping for the best. Who is reading the words of some tiny stationery shop? And yet: It’s a strange thing to know that I’ve somehow connected with some other spirit, off in the universe as well.