Travel Journalling

One of the best souvenirs of any trip or travelling or adventure or season is a journal with your memories and thoughts and ephemera. It’s both extremely low cost (the cost of a notebook and a pen) and also extremely high cost (the time and effort and energy of writing), but there is nothing more satisfying and special than the pages that you filled from a train or a cafe or a hotel restaurant, with little scraps of a menu or business card or paper bag glued in.

Mainly, I suppose, because my pages do not look fabulous or beautiful or even well-balanced, I’ve been really embracing the act of journalling out in the world and on the go. Sometimes I glue in photos or other ephemera in advance, the night before, and count on a moment in a cafe or at the water park to fill in a few pages around the pictures.

I’ve also accepted a bit of chronological chaos, as I don’t often plan perfectly when it comes to gluing in the photos. There are times when I skip around a page or two, or have the dates mixed up, but in the long run, I don’t think it will matter too much if we went to the zoo on the 13th or the 14th, and there’s a lot of nonsensical frivolity that is not related to real-time logistics anyways.

I’ve also started this new habit of taking a photo of the book I’m reading, and when I’m finished, I glue it wherever I’m at in my journal, writing about it for a page or two. Sometimes, by chance, the book page is interspersed within a day’s journal pages, rather than neatly between two dates, so it’s just a little book rambling pause in the daily journalling. It’s turned out that I’ve really enjoyed this addition to my daily journal, as it’s a record in its own way—what I was reading, when and where. Ah yes, that journey I went on in my mind, in the pages, while I was on a journey of another sort somewhere else.

And this year, Junia’s journalling skills continue. Once again she’s in a Midori A6 notebook, although last year it was mostly scribbling and scratching. This year, she chooses the pictures she’d like (like with the other two, it’s always a surprise for me), and then she tells someone what she’d like to say about the photo and we help her write it down. In a way, it’s fun to see and hear the transcriber’s interpretation process, asking for clarification, what they do when Junia says something that doesn’t totally match up with the photo, or what they know to have actually happened, if they add their own clarification when they understand what Junia means, even if she doesn’t articulate it fully. For the kids, there’s an element of loyalty to the precision of truth, and also a point at which they don’t care enough to spend the time arguing with a three-year-old.

In any case, the older two are also journalling, and I hope they continue this practice as they get older. I am not one for looking back in my journals, but both Caleb and Naomi love looking back at their old journals and seeing what they did before, who they were before. And to look back on adventures abroad, what a gift.

It’s both: it’s a gift to look back, and it’s also a gift to have your journal in the moment, even if you never read it again. The act of writing something down, especially by hand, is an intentional one. The beauty of a journal is to take the time to remember, and to reflect and enjoy and commiserate and plan, to not let life swoosh by too quickly, without our noticing, our appreciation of the details, our witnessing of the tiny moments and treasures on the journey.