Travel Journals

You’ll thank yourself for keeping them.

I never travel without my diary.
One should always have
something sensational
to read in the train.
—Oscar Wilde

All but one of the many bound journals I’ve been gifted over the years sit empty, too pretty to write in, gathering dust while I wait for “the perfect occasion” to use them.

But I did sully one book with my words: a pocket-sized travel journal, intended for noting both itinerary details and observations about the places visited. I used it during an Amtrak trip along the Mississippi, St. Paul to New Orleans. To reread its pages is to recall the train’s metronomic rocking, which has always underscored for me the otherworldliness of the journey, neither here nor there, time out of time to just be. It brought back genial conversations in the lounge car that added to the ambiance without distracting from my book or scenery-viewing. The roomettes with their cozy bunks and tiny sinks and tinier reading lamps.

I didn’t note any of these details; they appeared viscerally as I later read my jottings—diary entries really, about my dining car companions, my goals for the future, a bad breakup.

Most of my trips live only in my memory, which means they’re starting to leave me forever. That one time I used a “travel journal,” I didn’t even think to note details about the destination itself that might have enriched my memories later: how it smelled, what I felt while traipsing its sights and sites, what those sites and sights were.

But flawed as it is, I’m grateful to have it. Even done wrong, it kept alive for me a journey that I had made in a callow time. That’s the moral: any travel journal is worth the trouble, even if you do it “wrong.”

Vanilla Papers is a site about journaling, lifestyles, and Egypt. (This confused me, too, but bear with her: She’s an expat living in Egypt who wants to help you slow down and enjoy life’s travels, so there you have it.) A page within this site offers advice on keeping a travel journal.

Pre-trip, she says, your journal can help keep your excitement up. This wouldn’t strike me as necessary at first glance—I mean, if I’m going, it’s because I want to go, right? But I can recall many trips that somebody else planned that I didn’t bother to research much. I enjoyed the experience, but if I had known specific things about where I was going, my experience would have been enriched—and discovering them during my own research would certainly have gotten me more eager to go.

The journal writing itself can also be its own experience. Write while waiting at the airport, during a spare slot of time between outings too brief to do anything else but too long to stare at your navel.

I like that she advises you to brag about things you did—and motivate yourself to keep doing stuff when you come home. (I write this here in the same spirit as Lewis Carroll’s Alice: “I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.”)

She also proposes using the journal as a collage collective of sorts—ticket stubs, receipts, local news clippings, bottle labels, matchbooks. Jot down on its pages the names and phone, email, or social info for people you meet and would like to keep in touch with.

I happen to know there are artists among my subscribers. Do you do this? I myself am shy about three dimensions. I’m more likely to stick to words, but I’m guessing the creatives who expand their wings into collage work have more interesting journals. What do you think?

It’s useful for organizing information and other mundane purposes, too, of course—itineraries, dates, budgets. You can also note important information—phone numbers, emergency contacts, flight numbers and arrival-departure times, other details you’d need if your phone or wifi went out.

At the end of her long and varied listing of ideas, the Vanilla Papers writer sums up: “When you’re starting out, keep things simple … Buy a simple journal that you won’t mind “spoiling” with awkward doodles or sloppy handwriting. Remember that it’s better to have an imperfect journal that’s yours than none at all … You’ll find it invaluable to reread years from now—and you won’t mind that it’s not perfect.”

Did something not-so-great happen during your trip? Or maybe a singular experience will color how you approach your life back home. The Journey site offers suggestions for writing a reflective journal that you can use to document how you felt about a recent trip and lessons you can learn for planning your next destination.

You can use the thoughts and feelings you note to understand the things that have happened, reflect on why they happened, and align future actions with your values and with lessons learned from them. Best of all, writing reflections can help you get your thoughts down on paper and out of your head.

You can reflect in two ways: on your feet while you’re doing the thing you’re doing, or later, thinking back on what you did and how you felt about it.

Which of these approaches most appeals to you? Why?

“Travel writing 101: How to turn your trips into a tale” is the delightful headline of one of the pages in Adventure.com. Its text begins with a story from a writer-filmmaker, but worry not—the lesson his story offers is not about how to shoot professional movies but about how he learned what was missing from his earliest attempts to document his travels in writing.

“Met a man called Mike in a town called Athens in Michigan,” I’d written. So far so good. “Had a really interesting conversation with him about the decline of car industry here, and his theory of why there’s so many alien sightings. Had coffee and rode another 20 miles before camping.”

What he didn’t write down, which would have made a much better story, was what those interesting things were. His experience is essentially another example of what was wrong with my train trip journal, which failed to note what towns the train touched, the kinds and colors of flora and fauna and land and sky I saw out those big windows, what I thought of the chicory coffee or the newspaper’s real estate entries noting slave quarters alongside square footage and numbers of bathrooms.

The author learned from this experience, and later, when he met a pair of brothers while camping in New Mexico,

When Phil began to talk about his brother, I scribbled down what he said verbatim so it wouldn’t be lost. I noted his facial expression, and the way they put their arms around each other when they joked. I wrote down the name of their company, then I snapped a picture of them both and went on my way. 

Much better, don’t you agree?

I’d love to hear from you about your travel writing efforts—or, for that matter, any of your day-to-day writing.

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Lagniappe: June is Pride month. Currently, depending on where you live, expressing pride or simply being who you are is a life-threatening act. Trans Lifeline was established in 2014 as the first-ever crisis hotline for trans people and is now expanding to increase outreach to people of color. The Marsha P. Johnson Institute, whose namesake was a key player in the 1969 Stonewall uprising, defends the rights of Black transgender people. Find lots more organizations specifically addressing trans services here.