How to keep a travel journal

Do you remember times you forgot what you did on a specific day or names of the places you visited?

Keeping a travel journal is a great way to remember and reflect on the things you’ve done or learnt during your trip. It’s just very difficult to be consistent with it! How many of you started a travel journal and ended up writing only for the first couple of days as you simply did not have the time to write during your holiday?

Keeping a journal whilst traveling is tough – we tend to be busy going from A to B, getting lost, finding out how things work in a new environment, spending time with family and friends, exploring and having fun.

So, here are my 3 super simple tips for how to keep a travel journal.

Size matters

There are thousands of beautiful travel journal books out there, but I find them too large, too wide, too thick and too bulky. They may look prettier in your book shelf, but what is the point if they end up staying inside your suitcase for the entire journey without being used because you find it too heavy and too big to carry around?

I personally use a thin A6 size (roughly 10X15cm) notebook. This way I can carry it around literally all the time during my journey and write pretty much anytime anywhere.

No pressure

Be careful with the idea of ‘perfection’ as it usually will cost your time and mental energy. You will feel the pressure and stop enjoying your travel journal writing… and eventually giving it up all together. Embrace messy handwriting, spelling errors and dodgy sentence structures. You just need a quick note to trigger your memories and experiences from that day. After all, you’re there to experience and enjoy that moment that you have right then right there.

I don’t usually get a big chunk of ‘journal writing time’ when I’m on the road. In my case, I want to note details like names, locations and prices of certain place for the blog. So I just quickly jot them down and maybe a couple of lines about my impression of the place when I have a couple of minutes, and yes, with lots of grammatically questionable sentences.

Use a template

If you feel you need a bit more structure, using a template with prompts might help.

I have made a super simple travel journal template which you can download for free.

It is divided into 6 sections: Things I saw, Food and Drink, People I met, Moments to remember. There is a large box in the centre for more writing (or drawing!) and the last small box is reserved for your own chosen focus topic such as ‘Things I was grateful for’, ‘How much I spent’ etc…

There will be 2 templates on each page, which means when you printed and folded in half each template will be in A5 (roughly 15X21cm), compact enough to fit in a small bag or even in your pocket!

It is printer friendly and also shouldn’t use up so much of your ink (I find printer ink very expensive) as I didn’t use any fancy images or pretty colours 🙂

Happy writing!