These are the travel journaling tips I wish someone had handed me before my first trip with a notebook (and before I lost half the receipts I swore I’d stick in later). Some are practical, some are sentimental, and every one has been tested in airports, cafés and hotel beds around the world.
1. Write it now, make it pretty later
The most important part of travel journaling is getting it down while it’s fresh. The least important part is the aesthetic. A scrawled page written on a train beats a gorgeous spread you never get around to making.
2. Make a list when you don’t feel like writing
Some days you’re too tired, too busy having fun or you simply have something better to do than sit down with a full journal entry. That’s okay. Make a list instead, and make sure it has at least ten things on it. What you ate, what you saw, what made you laugh, the stranger who gave you directions, the song playing in the taxi. The first few items come easily, but the last few make you dig a little deeper, and that’s usually where the best memories are hiding. A list takes five minutes, and years later it can bring back the whole day.
3. Photograph your pages
Snap your pages as you go, and every so often take a photo of all your journals together. Notebooks get lost, soaked and left in seat pockets. Photos don’t.
4. Keep a pouch for ephemera
Tickets, receipts, boarding passes, sugar sachets and the paper wrapper from that perfect pastry all go into a pouch tucked inside the cover. When you finally sit down to write, every little memory is waiting for you in one place.
5. Stick it
If it matters, stick it in. Birthday cards, postcards, a map corner, a note from a friend. Cards usually end up forgotten in a drawer, but on that day’s page, they become part of the story. This is where washi tape and a glue stick earn their place in your bag.
6. Add an index
Leave the first page or two blank and build an index as you travel. When you want to find that one noodle shop or that one 2 am rant years later, you’ll thank yourself.
7. Start with a prologue
Open each new journal with a short prologue about where you are, where you’re headed and what you hope these pages will hold. Reread it at the end of the trip and see how much changed.
8. Use a phone app as your backup brain
When the notebook is buried in your bag, jot quick notes in a phone app (Day One is my fave) and copy them across later. Analogue heart, digital safety net.
9. Pack a sticker keeper envelope
Keep a small envelope of stickers and scraps in your bag so you can journal on the go. Café table, train seat or departure gate, wherever you land, your kit is ready.
10. Send a postcard to yourself
Before you leave a place, buy a postcard, write yourself a few lines about the day and post it home. By the time it lands in your letterbox, the trip already feels like a memory, and that little card carries the stamp of the country, the postmark from the town and the version of you who wrote it. Stick it into your travel journal next to that day’s page, and it becomes one of the most personal souvenirs you’ll ever collect.
Happy travels and happy journaling. Now go write something down, whenever and wherever you are.
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[…] before a flight. It all goes in, messy and unfiltered. If you want to start one, I wrote up my travel journaling tips […]