Keep a Travel Diary!

I swear the only reason Sean and I remember half of our first big trip (Central America in 2012) was due to writing in a diary every day. When we got home the whole trip seemed so surreal that when going over it with our friends and family we would need to look through the diary and our photos to to remember what we’d even done. Even only a week after getting home, our diary was able to prompt many nice “oh yeah, remember when we did that” moments.

I mean sure there were millions of details we remembered, we were away for 6 weeks, and we visited a few different countries, we met lots of cool people and we had a really great time… But what really made up each day? What companies did we use for tours? Where did we stay? What was that amazing restaurant overlooking the water with $2 cocktails and free tequila on Tuesdays? Those are the kind of details that escape the mind after time, and those are the times I want to remember forever.. So if you want to remember your trips.. read on.

The main motivation for our diary entries is to keep a record of our trip, so that we can reminisce and keep those memories forever. However it also comes in handy when recommending (or NOT recommending) accommodation and tour companies etc we have used along the way. The best part about it is that most of our entries only took us a minute or two to write! It is super easy to do if you make a habit of writing something down every day in your downtime. If you forget one day, that’s ok, catch up on the next. But if you leave it a whole week between writing, you end up having big gaps in your diary, and the process of writing becomes a lot more difficult and less enjoyable.

What we like to have in our diary entries:
– Accommodation (location, how we found it and price) i.e. is it good? bad? would we recommend it to friends?
– Tours (where we went, what we did, what company we used) again would we suggest anyone else 
– A drawing of our days major activity (Sean and I both suck at art so this is kinda just more for fun)
– A ticket stub or flyer from the activity we did or the place that we visited
– Restaurant/bar info
– Funny quotes/occurrences (Pretty much anything memorable, e.g. weird border crossings, kooky fellow travellers, sketchy incidents…)

Some days will have WAAAY more in them than others, and thats okay! It’s just really rewarding to be able to sit back and glance through your adventures even years after you took the trip. The memories really do just come flooding back.

What you need in your diary entries:
– Absolutely anything that YOU want (der, it’s your diary)

Be creative, write the things that you enjoyed the most, the things that made you smile, and even the things that made you angry sad or scared (I promise with enough time even most of these will make you smile). These are the kind of moments you can easily forget about with time and these are the kind of little moments in life that we think are the most important to remember.