How do you create a memorable record of your trip?
 

I took my first trip to Europe just three years ago, to France, followed by a trip the next year to England, but even in that short lapse of time, I found many of the wonderful memories blurring and small details fading. <BR><BR>Determined to keep a better record of my trip to Italy last fall, I bought a lightweight (5 ½ lb) laptop and a digital camera and packed them along, despite fears about the added weight.<BR><BR>I took tons of photos on the digital camera, and at the end of each day in our hotel room, I kicked off my shoes, downloaded the camera to the laptop, copied and pasted selected photos into a journal, and added reminiscences and explanations of the photos in text. It was a gas, and I’ll never travel without my laptop and digital camera again.<BR><BR>Do any of you have any great ideas about how to create a memorable trip record while on the road, with words and pictures?<BR>

But what a lot of work! It is worth it considering how much that cuts out of your vacation time?<BR>I don't think it would be for me.

I take tons of digital photos but don't bother with the laptop (use a digital wallet to store them till I get home). Also keep a brief journal during the trip. Then once home I spend weeks or months organizing the photos. It not only stretches out the enjoyment of the trip but then I have the memorable record. I don't think most people will forget the small details that soon. I agree with Ruby that I wouldn't want to spend that much time on the trip in a hotel room looking at photos.

I love this. Started keeping a record after our trip to London and have added more with other trips in the US.<BR><BR>Lots of pictures, both digital and regular.<BR>Postcards - some just to take home others sent to ourselves back home.<BR>Receipts - yes receipts.<BR>Any other memorbilla...matches, coasters, you name it.<BR><BR>Put it all in a scrapbook along with typed up itinerary notes. The postcards serve as photos better than I could likely take. The receipts are for particularly memorable eateries and bars. Hotel receipt is folded up so the name, room number, check in and check out dates are visible.<BR><BR>I do it not because I will soon forget the trip or to show to friends. I'm hoping that when I'm 70 my wife and I can pull out the book and remember 'the good old days' and feel good about doing things when we were young and able.

We take lots of pictures with a regular camera, my wife carries a small notebook and keeps a brief diary. She is also an artist and will sometimes make a simple watercolor or pen and ink sketch of an interesting spot. When we get home, I put all good the photos in their own album, cronologiclly with a brief note under each one, and put any little menus or other paper momentos in the back of the album.

I also use the laptop digital routine. (Plus underwater cameras put onto cd's) No time wasted in a hotel &quot;viewing&quot;. Simply download them - view them later.<BR><BR>Save on film and process, easy to add to documents later, and email.<BR><BR>I also bring tidbits, a dried flower, journal entries, a shell, postcard, reciepts, other goodies that find me.<BR><BR>:)<BR><BR>

We do just as Mike does, except we have not yet made the move to digital. We take lots of photos, buy postcards of each place as &quot;backup&quot;, collect any thing that seems to be of interest (coasters, napkins, match books, menus, hotel brochures, etc), keep all the receipts and hotel bills, car rental agreements, everything. Then when we get home we organize everything into scrapbooks (usually takes at least two to hold everythins), label the books, and put in our bookshelf. We have two bookshelves full of scrapbooks and we often just browse through them and recall all the wonderful trips. Like Mike, we don't do this so much to show our friends and family but as a means for us to recall the fact that we have been fortunate to be able to travel and see large parts of the world. Hopefully we will be able to continue doing this for many more years to come.

Since my husband and I both love to take pictures, he carries the 35mm and I carry a digital camera. When I get his film developed I have the lab put it on a CD so that I can incorporate them in a &quot;virtual Photo album&quot;. I use imagestation.com and they give you unlimited server space for FREE and they have the tools to easily assemble you images in an album. It's great.<BR>I also keep a small journal w/ me to jot down details and I write a detailed trip report. I keep the trip report to remind me of the hotels and restaraunts etc..

I must mention though, I bought a memory stick that holds 150+ images so I don't have to download till I get home.

In addition to taking tons of photos, I save every little scrap of paper that I get. Subway tickets, theater ticket stubs, cafe and hotel receipts, pub coasters, everthing. When I get home I mount them on a piece of poster board and frame them in an 8x10 (or whatever size you want) frame. I have a few of these all hanging on the same wall. Every time I walk by them I am reminded of these great trips.

I use Mike's methods, scrapping photos, postcards and memorabilia. I find the process to be an enjoyable reminder of the trip, and I find myself researching the sites, artworks, etc., in order to identify and explain. This is time-consuming, but a pleasure, and the captions that I put on the pictures make the photos meaningful for those who choose to look at my book, without my having to wax rhapsodic over every entry or photo. Also, I find once you begin the process of scrapbooking and journaling, you &quot;see&quot; the trip through different eyes. I also now remember to take pictures of things like the departure(either in the airport or on the plane), the hotel both inside and out, and some of the minor sights like neighborhood views, pictures of fruit stands, daytime and nighttime shots, etc. My goal is not just to have photos of the highlights, but to record the smaller details as well. It's fun to take pictures of us with some of the people we meet on the trip, and to recall our conversations, or their suggestions for eating or sightseeing.

I also do much the same as Mike. The jounal and pictures and receipts all go into a scrapbook when I get home, but I also save the bags all my goodies came in. Not the plain plastic ones, but the paper bags with neat designs or logos. I had a few from Brugge with beatiful designs on them and I used them as the background sheet for my pictures.

I remember to take along a large manilla envelope for collecting the postcards, ticket stubs, brochures, etc. Jot notes about each day's itinerary and put a slip for each day in the envelope.

I also do major paper collecting, receipts, knapkins, hotel bills, pamphlets, ticket stubs, and scrapbook them with photos and postcards after the trip. One of my favorites is to pull the labels off wine bottles and bring them home too so I can try and find them again for special dinners!<BR><BR>I use a business size envelope for each day of the trip and store all paper collected by day so it makes for easy matching up when the scrapbooking process starts! I used to keep 1 envelope of the whole trip and found it to be to hard to straighten out after two weeks abroad, then I went to every three-fouir days per envelop. Now I just do one a day. Much faster! Then I can write pertinant notes on the outside of the envelop too!

Barb &amp; Blue,<BR><BR>What a great idea! FINALLY a way to organize all that stuff I save, and keep it somewhat organized until I have time to go thru it. Thanks for the tip!

Every year my wife selects 12 vacation photos and has them made into a calendar at Kinko's. It's my favorite Christmas gift. I still have Dec. 2002 (a bridge in Venice)over my desk at work as well as Janurary 2003 (Lower Slaughter, Cotswolds).

Hi Mary Fran,<BR><BR>When we plan a trip I create a spreadsheet with details of reservations - air/auto/accommdations - also include the 'point(s) of interest for each day/area as we are planning the trip and receiving confirmations. We print the spreadsheet and an individual sheet for each day.<BR><BR>During the trip we use the material to jot down notes and attach receipts and other little 'pick up' items. We may add a hand-written reference of a discovery such as a good restaurant or site that attracted us. We cross reference any film we took. (use a Sony camcorder that has capability to take digital stills)<BR><BR>After the trip the documentation is used to reconcile cc charges; and eventually becomes a 'hard record' of our trip. <BR><BR>My wife adds some life. Typically she downloads stills to her computer and cuts a cd, keeps a library of stills to use as screen savers/wallpaper etc on our PC. We rotate them regularly which gives renewed life to our travel experiences. <BR><BR>She edits the film into mini-clips and creates short pieces. Eventually as DVD burners (equipment prices) get down to reality levels, she plans to cut DVD's.<BR><BR>I realize some may say we are over organized. But I take the tack that we get things done easily without covering ground twice. Our approach gives us a lot of time for adapting to all the surprises that we encounter. And, we are pleasantly reminded of our trips every day by the pictures on our computers.

1) Take TONS of pics. Even those that seem stupid. We average about 80-100 a day depending on the weather.<BR><BR>2) I take a microcassette and verbally record everything we do. I try to record a bit every time we hit the hotel for a break so I don't forget anything. I transcribe it when I get home and have a wonderfully detailed record of where we were, went, ate, the cost, etc.<BR><BR>The recording is often fun to listen to when something unexpected happens. Once, while in Hong Kong, we had pushed ourselves all day and night with almost no break. It was very exciting. At about 10pm, we finally hit the hotel and were exhausted. I pulled out my tape and started recording what we had done that day. Well, I was so tired, I literally fell asleep while talking! No joke. You can hear my tired voice slowly trailing off into silence! It's hilarious! Then you hear me clicking the recorder off and then back on and laughing. I caught myself falling asleep just a second later but it is so amazing to hear myself fall doze off mid scentence!

I like to bring home a hot little number from each location and she keeps me happy until the next trip.

lynn, in Paris this past Oct. my husband caught me slipping on the algae covered steps of the Seine. Fortunately only my feet went in and not the rest of me!

lynn, in Paris this past Oct. my husband caught me slipping on the algae covered steps of the Seine. Fortunately only my feet went in and not the rest of me!

This post has given me so many great ideas, and has reinforced the importance of making records to remember by.<BR>Thanks for the tips!

And you loved showing everyone your fancy electonic digital state of the art toys. The rest of us are too stupid to use high tech equipment and can not afford it anyway. We resort to old fashion film and book diaries. And we are too old to learn.<BR><BR>If I saw you dragging a laptop out of your backpack at the hostel I would laugh!

I went digital several years ago. I take tons of pics (2500 on a 25 day trip). With the cheap price of digital memory these days I have several memory disk - I don't bother with downloading anything.<BR><BR>I also have a cheap palm pilot with a foldup full size keyboard that I use to keep a journal - it depends on the trip if I take it or not. If not, at the end of each day I spend about 20 minutes jotting down everything we did. This is enough for me to write out a full journal later on.<BR><BR>When I get home, I spend the next several months planning my next trip and organizing my photos and journal from the trip that I just returned from.<BR><BR>I then post everything to my website,<BR><BR>www.appleberryroad.com<BR><BR>So, that's the way I do it.<BR><BR>jpm

Sharper Image sells talking photo albums by which you could add narratives to your photos.

Thanks for all the great responses and ideas! Tonight, realizing that I have to get up at 4:00 a.m. to get to the airport by 5:00, for my 6:10 flight to Disneyland, to join my son and sweet little grandkids (my son's Christmas present to me), realizing I still hadn't packed and it's 12:45 a.m., I found an excuse to peruse the illustrated journal I'd created on my trip to Italy. <BR><BR>I smiled over each page and pic once again. The combination of pics and text in what we call in the legal business a &quot;contemporaneous record,&quot; created when the event happened, took me back to Italy and to the people I met there. <BR><BR>I don't think any of the other kids &quot;in the hostel&quot; would laugh at me when I hauled out my laptop and started to download.

I also meant in my previous post to give Barb a big &quot;Hurrah&quot; for her comment about &quot;remembering to take pictures of things like the departure(either in the airport or on the plane), the hotel both inside and out, and some of the minor sights like neighborhood views, pictures of fruit stands, daytime and nighttime shots, etc. &quot; <BR><BR>My sister's approach until we started traveling together was to look always for the perfect photo. I like great photos too, but what I want to preserve is the &quot;experience,&quot; the pic of the flirtatious street vendor in Rome with the impish grin who announced to my sister and I, appropos of nothing, &quot;All the men in Brazil are gay.&quot; Oh, God. What have I started with that comment? What can I say? I have a son who is gay, and I still thought it was hysterical.

Blue--I love your envelope per day idea! You are right that sorting it out can be a challenge. Also the idea of jotting notes on the envelope itself is a good one; I plan to list the day's itinerary, places we ate, and impressions of the day.<BR><BR>Thanks, Mary Fran, for this thread--like some of you, I really love to travel, but have limited time off, so each trip is very special. My scrapbooks have been a source of pleasure for me and my husband, and a way to share my experiences with friends and family.

Starting tomorrow I promise to remove all the pictures stashed away from innumerables shoes boxes and put them in order.....After reading

<BR>We always have double prints of photographs made. I take one set of the doubles and cut around anything of interest in each of the pictures -- sometimes it's people, sometimes it's a site, sometimes it's just beautiful countryside. <BR><BR>I then use all these cut outs to create a giant collage, glueing the overlapping pictures to a sturdy poster board. Interspersed throughout, I glue on various ticket stubs and receipts. <BR><BR>After all the glueing, I take it to a frame shop and have it &quot;masterized&quot; which is having a clear gel painted over it so it looks like an old master painting. Then I have it matted and framed. <BR><BR>One of my favorite collages is from our 2001 3-1/2 week trip throughout Europe. EVERY time I walk by it I am reminded of some special moment of the trip!<BR><BR>I'm aleady excited about my upcoming collage-to-be! That will be from photos taken our our trip to Rome and the Almalfi Coast this fall!

My most successful plan is pocketed pages in our photo albumns. Can keep brochures etc and we pull our tram, city or country maps from there for the next trip. I get less diligent on journals and photos late in a trip and always regret it.

Thanks for this great thread from one of the most unorganized travellers. Blue, your envelope idea is terrific; why didn't I think of that? And Lynn, can you recommend a microcassette with high quality recorded sound -- for those church bells and happy children and waves lapping on the shore? J.