Why and How I Preserve My Travel Memories

Let’s face it: in the modern world of social media, emails and WhatsApp, no-one ever really writes anything down anymore. Sure, we may occasionally keep a diary, or a personal calendar that we may vow to jot everything down on, but rarely do we actually see that promise through. 

It’s far too easy these days to simply share a picture of something on Instagram or write a quick note in your phone than it is to actually pick up pen and paper.

In fact, if you’re anything like me, your hand will get stagefright when you come to have to write a pile of Christmas cards – and many of us don’t even do that anymore, preferring instead to send a bulk text or a “Christmas email” (that shouldn’t be a thing, FYI).

So when I saw that BiC had created a campaign called #JustWrite, to encourage people to write things down (like they used to do in the old days, kids), I thought it was a marvellous thing to talk about.

And it actually reminded me of the only time I ever do really write things down these days: when I travel.

Because it’s so easy to live your whole life online, I often wrongly assume that that is the same as storing all my thoughts forever on the internet.

Oh, I can delete that photo now – I’ve uploaded it to Instagram, so I can look at it whenever I want.

I needn’t keep a note of that funny thing that happened today – I’ll simply trawl back through all my old posts and be able to read up again on it one day in the future.

Alas, it doesn’t work quite like that.

We often forget that the life we share online is filtered; it isn’t a true reflection of what has happened each day or who we are as people. And there are some moments and some stories that are personal and will never be shared with relative strangers online. Which means that, despite sharing so much of our lives with the world, we don;t share everything. And if we don’t share everything, then, in time, we’ll forget.

Plus, some of the social media sites we use today may not be around in the future, so what happens to all the memories we have shared on them then?

The only mementos that we can truly keep forever are those that are physical things. Notebooks, photographs, keepsakes.

All these things help fill in the gaps in our memory about our life experiences and can be looked at time and again.

Which is why, when I travel, I try and preserve my travel memories in a number of ways.

Travel Notebooks

Scott and I both travelled around the world with journals, but instead of treating them as a diary, we wrote down funny phrases, memories and sketches of places that we had stayed. We built upon this information all the time and we still try and keep it up even to this day, about our daily life in Amsterdam.

We regularly flip through the books and reflect on funny things that happened and the names of people we would have otherwise forgotten, and it helps to keep the memories alive. Often, one of us will have to ask the other what a certain phrase means, and the other will share the story all over again, as if it only happened a matter of weeks ago.

Sending Postcards Home

Writing postcards seems pretty old fashioned these days, and I have to admit that we only really started sending them regularly in our second year of full-time travel.

But we realised that it would be nice for us to see them all once we returned home and maybe even collect them to display in our own house. We even started sending ones addressed to the dog (care of Scott’s parents’ address) so that we could pick them up when we got home and then look back on them one day and laugh (most of the content of those postcards involved what kind of tasty street scraps said country had on offer that the Basset would have liked, had she been with us).

It was also nice to send the postcards to friends and family who had children – it gave them something to look forward to when the mail arrived and also made them more curious to find the destination on a map.

Keeping Hold of Ticket Stubs, Maps and Other Keepsakes

I have so many small scraps of paper from our travels that I’m not even sure what I will do with them, save creating one big collage. But I liked to keep entrance tickets from attractions and itineraries from transport – I even have one of the little netting clips we had to use when working on a vineyard.

They may seem small and insignificant, but they are real keepsakes that I can look back on forever.

Printing Out Photos Instead of Just Uploading Them

This is another biggie, and one I have only just gotten better at in the last year.

Because of Facebook, Flickr and Instagram, I often fall into the trap of just uploading my photos and then forgetting about them. I take dozens and dozens of photos of a place, just for them to be stored electronically and not really looked at.

So this year, we both decided that we needed to start printing out photos of our travels, of ourselves, our family and anything else that we might want to display around our apartment.

Not only does it make the place feel more homely and add our stamp to it, it is also yet another reminder of the experiences we’ve shared and the things we’ve seen.

So tell me – are there any ways you keep your travel memories alive once you get back home? Are there some glaring ones I’ve missed? I’d love to know! 

And if you’d like to find out more about the #JustWrite campaign that I mentioned, check out BiC’s Twitter account (@mybicpen).