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.