Documenting Your Travels
After a While, It All Runs Together
There's more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There's far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found…
The Circle of Life (Lion King, 1994)
There are two mementos we’ve chosen to chronicle our travels - a patch and a sticker. Tracy has some ideas of how she’ll display the patches on a backpack or denim jacket, and the stickers go on our cornhole boards.
Other than those items, our journey has been preserved through documentation.
Why document?
Documenting your travels does at least three things:
It acts as an extension of your memory, and can provide “accuracy” when friendly disagreements arise when the stories are retold.
It provides great warmth and memories for you to relive as you fondly look back on your travels and experiences.
It provides a written legacy for your children and grandchildren to remember you by.
Two challenges are ever present with a fulltime lifestyle - documentation can take weight and space, and discovering the best way to store your memories.
Journaling. Yes, there are people who still prefer to hand-write a daily journal. My grandmother kept a daily journal from 1958 until 1984, and it provides some very boring, routine, mundane reading. But there are hidden jewels in all those days of diary that provide a lot of insight into my grandparent’s life. The problem is that those diaries take up space that we don’t have, and while we still have them in storage, I’m not sure how many more generations will be interested in keeping those books around.
There are probably ways to coordinate with family members to pass those written journals down, but there are better ways now to share your journeys electronically.
Post Cards. Very “old fashioned”, we found this to be an outstanding way of communicating regularly with our grandchildren. First, receiving something personal in the U.S. mail now is so rare that it has become very special. While our grandkids are small and still can’t read, they love looking at the pictures and know it’s from Memaw and Boppa. And our grandson, born in 2016, probably has a stack of over 100 postcards from us that one day he will be able to read and enjoy the memories of our trip. And it’s a very inexpensive souvenir that has some meaning. Tracy started this idea and she has been faithful to share our adventures in this way.
Social Media. When we retired and started our on-the-road adventure, we didn’t have this figured out. Tracy was reasonably active on Facebook, so she began posting and documenting our locations and activities the first year.
That has actually worked out well for us, but it’s not as permanent or preserved as we would like. We’ve learned about other websites and apps that help document travels that we are investigating, like Polarsteps, and I’ve mapped out our trips on Roadtrippers. I think in the end, you have to try a few and find what works best for you. It’s possible to spend some money on various apps that make certain promises and then be disappointed. We’re still trying to find the best media to share and preserve our journeys,
Start a blog. For us, this seems to be an easy way to document the unusual things and random thoughts along the way. It’s difficult to keep a daily blog interesting enough to engage followers, but my intention is to highlight the strange or unusual and thereby keep the reader’s attention.
Digital scrapbooks. Apps such as Shutterfly enable you to compile your pictures in a memorable album and create a digital scrapbook that can be printed or shared with others.
Next: Experience vs. Stuff
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