Travel Journals

Travel Journals are an essential tool on a trip and for after a trip. The reasons I keep one are

* To be able to recall moments from our holiday for scrapbooking.
* To remember the address/ location of somewhere new we went for next time we go there or to tell others about it.
* To record what room we stayed in at a hotel so that I can either request it if it was a great room or request NOT to be in that room or area of the hotel if it wasn't.
* If I see or hear of something to research, I write it down.
* We are a family that likes to sit around the dinner table playing the whole "What were we doing this time last month/year?" We pull out the Travel Journal and say 'On this day we did this..." It is a great way to keep the memories alive for our family.

What I include in my daily writing.
Before I leave, I pre-fill in the date and location we are in at the top of each page. I have a sticky tab that I move to the current page for quick access.

On each day
*Rm. number in the hotel. 
* What we did that day. It might be a recall or dot points depending on time.
* Name and address (if it is new) of places and restaurants we visited.
* I sometimes write what we ate...seems bizarre but so many times we have looked back and wondered what we ate, so I just dot point it. Likewise, if we bought something special I note that down.

If I have time during the day when we are out, say in the car or in a theme park in line for a ride, I use my notes app to type down what we have done and then I can write it in my journal later.

If you miss a day
So, you missed one day, but you got most the rest. Families are good at helping recall if you ask them, even little children. Likewise, by looking at my itinerary I usually am reminded of what we did. Car Journeys are a great time to ask everyone what we did on a certain day. 

Getting help writing the Journal
I have found that as my children have grown up, they can assist with the Journaling process. I get car sick if I write/read, so my children from say year 5 have been able to write what I dictate. By doing this out loud, often other family members throw in things from their perspective that you might not have initially written or seen happen. It makes the car trip a lot nicer having these conversations and laughing over things that happened.

Here is an example of a Travel Journal entry. It is nothing exciting, just recalling a fairly quiet day, but it was really useful the next trip as we were able to go back to somewhere that I wrote about, and when people ask me rough costing of Snorkels I have it written down.

Kids Travel Journals
I used to go to the effort of getting travel Journals for my children, and for my family, it was a stinking big failure and more stress for me. I gave up after about 5 trips. But then my youngest daughter told me she really wanted to have a Travel Journal, so after much thinking, I came up with a better option. I made up a travel Journal that was like a little book with A4 pages folded in half and stapled down the middle. On each day, I filled in the date and where we would be. I then asked questions that would be a quick way to recall what we did. Amazingly it worked. As she got older, I increased the depth of question so that instead of circling a yes or no, she had to write sentences.
I now use Adobe Illustrator to make up really nice Travel Journals because I know she loves doing it and I include this as a part of her Plane Present.

Here is one from 2013 you might get ideas from. it was a trip where we only did Hawaii so there was not as much to write as one where we are on the Mainland. We name trips where we are travelling with another family- thus the "SmClatchey trip" heading. Here is another one. I like that I asked questions about the plane trip too. I cannot see where I have stored the Illustrator Travel Journal, so will have to keep looking and if I find it I will put it here.