What about those funny German guys you met or that intelligent French woman who spoke three different languages and inspired you to keep practicing your Spanish. If you are sitting in a little cafe or hostel on an island in Thailand, what do you see, what to do you hear, who is around you? I think the thing that makes a traveler’s journal the most exciting is when you can recount specifics. I love recounting conversations with strangers, what the food from that random street stall tasted like, and how it all made me feel or what it reminded me of or made me think of that is familiar to me. I love nothing more than to spend hours writing in my journal about all the things that have happened in the last 24 hours. I am, above all else, a writer (at least in my own head). The number one thing that a travel journal is for me is a place to look back on moments and memories. Write about stories, events, and people that you want to remember Then I’ll put it on the page where I eventually want it to be and just stick it in there once I’m back home or when I can find some elsewhere further down the road. If I’m on the road and the hostel, hotel, or guest house where I’m staying doesn’t have tape or glue. Most of these things will require some tape or a glue stick. It’s for your memories and to prove to your kids and grandkids one day that you were pretty cool back in your youth.Īll of these travel journal ideas and prompts are great whether you’re moving abroad, taking a two-week trip, or going on a huge round the world adventure.
Keeping a traveler’s notebook should be for the joy of it all and while this post will help give you some guidance as to how to keep a fun traveler’s journal with some general travel journal ideas, there’s no right or wrong way to go about it. Those detailed accounts of what we did, where we stayed, how much we spent became the very first blog posts on Eternal Expat and they helped grow this audience in a way that I never expected.īut you don’t have to journal for any specific reason. Those journals were also the start of this blog. Those two notebooks are the most detailed travel journals that I’ve ever kept and I’m so glad I did because it was such a pivotal part of my 20s and it was an experience that brought me to where I am today. I was seeing new things every day and I wanted to document it all. I thought one would be enough and I ended up buying another while I was on the road.
In those short six months, I worked my way through two full notebooks. Then I traveled around South East Asia for 6 months and wrote so much. There’s the journal full of angst that I kept from the year I taught English in Korea. Three more from the two years I lived in and traveled around Australia.
I have two from the year I lived in New Zealand. Since 2008, I have kept countless other travel journals. It was the rawest, most hilarious, and naive journaling I’ve ever done and I love peeking back into that part of my life. I look back at that traveler’s notebook less and less often, but I still love paging through it every now and again. I wonder if Eternal Expat would even exist if I hadn’t started journaling way back in 2008. Instead, as a going-away present, my best friend gave it to me because she’d loved keeping one during her semester abroad. I hadn’t thought that I might want to journal about my experiences. I didn’t even buy this traveler’s notebook for myself. I was 20 years old and I was about to spend a semester studying abroad in a small town in the German-speaking side of Switzerland. I started my first traveler’s notebook while I was sitting at the airport waiting for my flight to Zurich.