Travel Journaling can be easy. That’s especially true when you learn some pointers on how to start a travel journal and have the best travel journal prompts. So keep reading to learn why it’s important to keep a travel diary and just how easy it can be to capture your travel memories for a lifetime, below.
CONTENTS – In this article, you’ll learn all about writing a travel diary, including ideas and prompts, writing tools, and little known secrets:
- How to Write A Travel Journal
- What is a Travel Diary?
- The Value of Travel Journaling
- Best Tips for Writing a Travel Diary
- The importance of Taking Notes
- Finding the Right Travel Journal Prompts [===>Download]
- Examining Your Emotions on Paper
- Including Other People in Your Travel Journal
- Scouting for Souvenirs of Your Trip
- Final Thoughts on Travel Diaries
How to Write a Travel Journal: Ideas, Tools, and Secrets
Do you take a notebook on your journeys? Have you got a special place where you keep thoughts, share memories, emotions, and travel events?
Or maybe you love traveling but still don`t have a travel diary. If it’s because you don’t know how to write a travel diary, then you’re about to learn how easy it can be.
Why is it important to keep one?
Because after a trip is over, the important details, like the smells, tastes, and sounds, quickly fade away. They become covered by a layer of city events.
When you have a travel diary, you can always dive into the atmosphere of last voyages.
Related: The Art of Collecting Travel Maps: Introducing the Most Amazing Hobby!
What is a Travel Diary?
Travel lovers usually get a lot of information during their adventures. And it’s excellent when you can remember and recall it many years later.
For this purpose, travelers keep special diaries, writing impressions of their trip adventures, valuable facts, and other lovely details.
So, what is a travel diary? A travel diary is a notebook, which is convenient to take up with you on the road. Usually, it’s a small notebook with a thick cover that is easy to fit in any bag, like a leather traveler’s notebook.
A travel diary is a creative process to reflect and allow yourself to revisit the experience. Below you can find the most popular purposes of travel diaries:
- Get a fix on reality in a different space
- Capture the experiences you’re having
- Collect data about your environment
- Increase your artistic awareness
You never know what creative journaling ideas you’ll come up with while you’re traveling when you consider these things.
Many travelers keep electronic journals, and you can do that. But paper diaries are still more popular and stand the test of time. (Who knows, they may even become family heirlooms!)
Benefits of Travel Journaling
Broadly speaking, people tend to keep a diary under different circumstances.
For some, it helps them become more beautiful and healthier by tracking self-care habits and diet. Others keep a journal to learn how to make money or become wiser.
So why should you keep a travel diary?
Many reasons may encourage you, as a tourist, to take up this exciting and rewarding activity. After considering these reasons and reflecting on them, you might be excited to start a travel diary for yourself. But, first, consider some reasons:
1. You’ll Remember A Beautiful Place or Event in Detail
While traveling, you visit many beautiful places and see unique sights. Exciting things and events often happen to you as well.
But the trouble is, time passes, friends come to visit you, and you can’t tell them anything about these events. Of course, when you show them photos, you can say where you have been and what you have seen.
But imagine if you have a travel diary. How interesting it would be for your listeners to hear about exciting travel details.
2. Travel Journaling Encourages Your Spiritual Growth
When you keep a travel journal, it helps affect your spiritual development. People remember information better when they update it in their minds.
Repetition is the mother of learning, isn’t it? It helps to remember these places and events and to learn something new from them.
3. You’ll Become a Better Storyteller
The third reason to keep a travel journal is that you learn how to tell interesting stories about your travels from diaries. In this way, you are learning the art of a superb storyteller. They say “practice makes perfect.” Whether you’ve always wanted to be a better writer or just want to improve your communication skills, storytelling always comes in handy.
4. Journaling Helps You Process Your Experiences
A travel diary helps to endure common life problems more efficiently and deal with stress. The human brain forgets everything, both good and bad.
Imagine, a few years later, you’ll take your diary and dive into a sea of positive emotions. Your blood rushes adrenaline, which encourages you not to give up on the problems.
It can also help you work through challenges you’re facing when you travel. Let’s face it: travel isn’t always perfect. Feeling frustrated by the language barrier? Exhausted from jetlag? Miss your connecting flight or hate the food?
Take note of it in your travel diary. Not only does it help you vent so you can release negativity, in retrospect, you will see how you overcame difficulties and are becoming a a better traveler!
Best Tips for Travel Journaling: Travel Journal Ideas, Tools, and Secrets
Here you’ll get to know the ideas, tools, and secrets to write a diary entry.
Take Notes as you Go Along | Tip #1
Take notes during your trip because it’s challenging to remember critical details after returning home.
However, that doesn’t mean you have to write everything you did on a particular day altogether. Instead, try to take notes several times a day and note the activities, sights, and experiences that immediately come to mind.
Here are some tips:
- Don’t forget to date each note so that you can remember the chronology of a trip. You may also put a time next to each entry.
- Allocate a specific time for journaling. For example, journal at breakfast time or before bedtime. Also, if you are traveling to another location by plane, train, bus, or car, that trip would be a great time to work on your journal.
- If you’re in a hurry, make brief notes about the current day on a piece of paper and then rewrite it in your diary when you have more time. You might just jot things down on your smartphone or a small piece of paper until you have time to thoroughly reflect and make a journal entry. If you don’t take notes as you go along, you might forget some details so that drafts can come in handy.
Come Up with a Topic | Tip #2
It’s often easier to keep a journal if you can focus on a central idea. Think back to everything you saw and did on a particular day, and see if there’s a single theme that slips through that will help you frame your note.
If you have trouble with identifying a topic for a note, ask yourself some travel journal prompts:
- What made you smile today?
- What surprised you today?
- What did I learn today?”
- Add more journal prompts
Write out the answers that definitely help you come up with a topic.
Click here to Download your 99 Travel Journal Prompts [FREE].
Engage with Your Emotions | Tip #3
Don’t describe in your journal only what you see. Emotions are essential as well. An exciting note includes telling what you heard, tasted or smelled, and felt during a trip.
{There are no insignificant details, since sometimes it’s the little things that will help you remember a journey years later. For example, describe the flowers’ smell at the café where you dined, or a breeze you felt while lounging on the beach.}
replace with an actual feeling
Describe the People You Meet or Travel With | Tip #5
You’re likely to meet a lot of interesting people on your trip, so be sure to include them in your notes. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fellow traveler from your tour group or the cab driver who gave you a ride in Rome.
Think about what they looked like, talked about and, most importantly, what feelings they evoked in you, and then add that to your notes.
What did they look like? What did they say or do? How did they make you feel? Remember these are the characters of your story, so the more detail you capture, the more they will come to life when you look back on your diary.
Gather Reminders of Your Trip | Tip #6
From the moment your trip begins, start gathering materials to help chronicle your journey. Not only will they become souvenirs of your trip, but they can all breathe life into memorie sin your journey.
For instance:
- Boarding passes
- Postcards
- Tickets to local attractions
- Restaurant and hotel business cards
- Napkins with restaurant logos
- Instant photos
- Local food and drink labels
You don’t have to glue or pin these things into your journal while you’re traveling. Instead, just set aside the gathered materials in a folder to add them when you get home. If you’re short on space, you can snap a photo of them instead.
In fact, a few key travel photos can be a great memento that highlights your trip in your journal. Read these tips on how to take a better travel photo.
Most importantly, don’t forget to leave a space between notes if you want to include the relevant materials in your journal. That will round out and help illustrate your experience in your travel log.
Final Thoughts on Keeping A Travel Diary
Traveling is a time for development and new experiences, and an opportunity to explore the world more. If you’re going on a trip, you’ll want to remember everything you did for many years. A journal for traveling helps to preserve pleasant memories and make a journey more exciting. If you don’t keep a travel journal yet, consider writing about travel after reading this article.
Want to continue learning about keeping a travel diary? Click over to these 11 best travel journal ideas that will help capture your memories forever. You’ll find travel journal examples that will inspire you.
Author Bio: Isabelle Jordan is a business and marketing journalist at Ekta Traveling insurance company. She writes for different news portals and thematic blogs that help her stay at the heart of the travel and insurance news. Isabelle knows everything and more about travel guard insurance.
Photo credits: Journal – That’s Her Business , Thought Catalog, Megan te Boekhorst (woman)Tyler Nix