Are you looking to start your very own travel journal but are struggling to get started? Do you need some travel journal ideas to get you started on your journal to chronicle your worldly travels?
Then step forth, for today we will be outlining 10 top tips for starting your own unique travel journal that is true to you while still being entertaining and special.
1. Tickets & Maps
For a more unique and eye-catching journal, why not tack your travel ticket stubs and maps to the pages upon which you are writing about your journeys?
This is one of those creative travel journal ideas that, once you get into the habit of, you will struggle not to keep up. Soon enough, you will find yourself collecting ticket stubs even from your bus tickets to and from work, obsessively wanting to take note of every single journey you make.
Travel journals are, after all, for the obsessive, so fill your travel journal pages with this obsession.
2. Interactions
A great way to remember things is to write them down. So, if you are one who is quick to forget, then why let a unique interaction that you have while away get lost in the sands of time and negligent memory? This is one of the central tenets of how to keep a journal.
Using travel journal prompts such as this, you can soon fill up travel diary after travel diary with travel memories such as these.
So, when you embark on your next trip, make sure you are taking note of all those things that you are likely to forget along the way. Being elsewhere can be an overwhelming experience for the brain, so it is sometimes difficult for it to know which bits of information to keep and which to do away with.
3. Sketches
What better way to render your travel bullet journal more vividly than with the use of illustrations? Even if you are not the kind of person who is artistically inclined, you must concede that images are a great way to quickly capture the essence of something when words fail you, right?
Travel journaling can play host to so many great ideas, so why not let some of these ideas be pictorial ones?
4. Money & Glue
Very often, the first thing you are likely to do when you arrive in a country (or indeed one of the last things you do before departing to it) is to go to a bureau de change and get out some money. So too goes the ritual at the end of a holiday, where you are left unpacking after your flight and find all of your money in a purse or a pocket.
Some choose to simply keep the money until next time, and some to change it back up to their home currency. However, one of the more unique travel journal ideas suggests gluing some of this money into your journal. Pretty neat, huh?
5. Postage Stamps
Much in the same way that you might collect postcards in a trip journal as a visual representation of the places you have visited, you can also use stamps for this same purpose.
Often, stamps are a complete pictorial embodiment of their place of origin, dressed with iconography and imagery of the location in question. Why not forego drawing such images yourself and garb your own travel journal with stamps instead? Even if you have no interest in foreign stamps, this is a great way to capture the feel of a place with little effort.
6. Flora
One of the first things you are likely to notice if you are visiting a country with a vastly different climate than your own is just how different the flowers and wildlife can be.
So, what better way to chronicle the unique nature of your experience than capturing some of this flora for your own travel journals?
But, you ask, how can you possibly keep flowers in a journal? Long lost, it seems, is the art of flower pressing - simply placing a flower into a book to press it flat. Depending on the flora, you can easily do this with any vegetation you encounter while abroad.
7. Color
Our times abroad are rarely ever experienced in greyscale. No, we see the colors, sights, and sounds of a new place every which way in a full spectrum of experiences.
So, why not let the colors of a place seep into your travel journal examples? Let some wine splash onto the page, or perhaps even some soil from a certain place, or let sea salt and sand crystalize upon the page to garb it indefinitely with the sensory overload of memory.
8. Stickers & Food Packaging
One of the other more obvious differences when abroad is the way that another country packages its produce. This can be a very simple way of provoking a potent feeling of nostalgia in someone who has, say, lived in a place for a time and then been without a certain product for a while.
Products are expendable and, thus, we go through them quicker than almost anything else. Travel writing prompts should include everyday life and other little details too, so do not forget to include all the products you consume along the way.
No packing list is complete without your own leather journal and a glue stick.
9. Postcards
Indeed, just as you might collect samples of stamps along the way, you can also do things the old-fashioned way with postcards. Some opt to collect them and take them home, though, for a perhaps more authentic approach, you can also send them home to yourself.
Who knows, maybe you could even race the postal service and see who gets home first. This way you get the postcard as well as those sweet and authentic local postage stamps. No to-do list is complete without blank pages for wonderful ideas such as this. Besides learning how to plan a vacation itself, this is one of the most classic things about traveling.
10. Custom Cover
Buying a journal from the store is all well and good but you could also create your own custom cover for an even more immersive and authentic journaling experience.
If you are going to limit yourself to one journal per country, then why not include some script from the local language on the cover to instantly transport you to that place?
This can be a fun way to have your own way with the world map while still having the best travel journal around.
Final Words
So, there you have it! Hopefully, you are now feeling ready and able to get started writing and collating your very own travel journal. Use these prompts but do not strictly adhere to them to the point that you lose yourself amongst them.
FAQs TRAVEL JOURNAL IDEAS
HOW DO YOU START A TRAVEL JOURNAL?
The best way to start anything of this kind is simply to be true to yourself. As long as you are honest with yourself and your intentions, then there is no possible way that you can go wrong. So, the first thing to do when starting a travel journal is to ask yourself what you intend to get out of the experience. Perhaps you are simply wanting to chronicle your experiences traveling so that you can better remember them later, or perhaps you are traveling for a specific purpose and want to keep track of expenditures and the like. Such factors will no doubt influence how you go about making your travel journal.
HOW DO YOU WRITE A TRAVEL JOURNAL SAMPLE?
Just be true to yourself and your intentions and you will be able to create your own travel journal without issue or hindrance. The real difficulty with writing of any kind is the struggle between truth and fiction. This is why it is better to start from your own experience before attempting to embellish, something that very much applies to travel journal writing.
