First of all, if you’re one of those people that goes on trips to sleep and rest… knock it off
You can sleep when you’re dead.
Traveling is for eating, seeing, thinking, learning, and documenting.
Secondly, I have met so many people who say their entire lives “I just want to travel so bad”
But then they never make it out of their driveway.
If you’re one of those people who wants to travel the world…
Just decide to do it.
There’s nothing more exciting than impulsively deciding to go on a trip that is sometimes to a destination you didn’t even realize you wanted to go to.
So remember
- You can sleep when you’re dead
- At some point, you need to decide to actually travel and not just talk about it
My first big international trip was to Europe. I was going to be visiting England, France, Italy, and Greece and I knew I needed the right kind of journal.
Unfortunately, the kind of journal I needed didn’t exist.
Instead of feeling sorry for myself and making some piece of crap journal from Target work… I made my older sister Miah learn how to book bind so she could make me the perfect journal.
With her help, I collected a bunch of random papers, black, graph, yellow, cardstock, lined, and envelope paper for storing all the random documents I knew I would collect
We created the perfect journal; I’ve used it for almost 10 years.
A travel journal is different from an ordinary journal because it’s not only about documenting your entire day. If you don’t remember one of the sites you saw… then it’s probably because you weren’t interested in it… and writing it down isn’t going to change that.
Travel journaling is to document what you saw, tasted, felt, heard, and touched. These are all the things you think you’ll never forget… But you do… pretty much 5 seconds after it happens.
Your travel journal is supposed to transport you back to your trip and that can only happen when you document all the different elements that are a part of your memories.
So for me, I needed a travel journal to document…
- The complete and utter hopelessness I felt when a bunch of gypsies chased me in Rome trying to steal my luggage and then I got kicked out of the airport by a Roman guard and his German shepherd and then after staying in a sketchy hotel I found bed bug bites all over my body and then I missed my flight to Greece and decided to take a 23 hour one through the middle east instead.
- The crunch, size, and taste of a massive falafel I ate in Nazareth Israel.
- How disgusting most of the Italian pizza I tried in Italy was.
- How many fat people I saw in Africa (there were only 4.)
- The feel of the bed on the night train from France to Italy.
- The taste of the whiskey-infused cake I accidentally ordered in Edinburgh.
- The sound of the Muslim call to prayer early in the morning in Ghana.
- The sound of African orphans playing with bubbles for the first time.
- The best hummus I’ve ever tasted in my life on the 12-hour flight home from Greece. #airplanefoodcanbegood
- The smell of the perfumery I visited in Paris.
These are the kinds of things that are worth remembering to me… but if I didn’t document them I would most likely forget.
Travel journaling makes you an intentional rememberer.
And we could all use some more intentional remembering in many more ways than just traveling.
So for the trip you will inevitably go on because you want to travel… find the perfect journal even if you need to make it yourself that will help you document all the crazy experiences you’re destined to have.
