Overseas Holiday? Well, I may as well let the beans spill that I’m off to Asia tomorrow morning! How crazy is that?! We’re spending a day and a half in Malaysia, and then we’re meant to be going to Seoul, South Korea. Unfortunately there are some major problems in South Korea at the moment, including floods, land slides and a cyclone! So, our plan is to spend our day and a half in Malaysia, and then re-assess from there! Lucky for us we have no return flights booked, so we’re really free as birds to explore Asia as we wish for the next week and a half!
So, back to the original question. How does a scrapbooker (or an memory keeper I guess) record the stories of a holiday. Two ways.
Physical:
There are physical things from your trip that you will want to keep. Travel tickets, entry tickets, maps, brochures, receipts even!
So I just get a bunch of envelopes. One for each day (plus a few spares). On the front of each envelope, I put the date. As we set off in the morning, I take that envelope with me in my bag, and fill it with tickets etc. as we go. On the front of the envelope I can also write down the places we stopped.
If I happen to have a map, sometimes I will trace out the journey for that day. It makes a great background in scrapbooking, and is a bit more interesting then a regular map!
Online/Computer Based:
We travel with our iPad. It’s handy because we can tether to it from our phones if we need internet on the go (and we have a local sim card), we can connect to wifi, and you can also just use it with no internet at all. We also download all our photos onto it, so that our SD card is free for the next day!
At the end of each day I force myself to write down the stories of that day. I say ‘force’ because some days you REALLY don’t feel like writing anything down. You’re tired, and it’s time consuming. But it’s worth it. When we went to Europe I spent time at the end of each day writing a blog post (sometimes it wouldn’t get posted for a few days though, because of lack of internet). I think I wrote somewhere how ‘today I really don’t want to write this, I just want to go to bed’, but really, if I hadn’t of written that, I would have forgotten! And imagine all the other things I would have forgotten by now! Keeping a journal (the more detail the better), is invaluable on your trip. If you know you won’t be home till after midnight because of a show, and you’ll be tired, then start your journal during lunch. That way in the morning you only need to record the second half of the day!
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As you scrapbook your journey afterwards, you will have tons of information kept. Those borchures are great for re-writing facts about the place you went, and can make lovely backgrounds for pages. The journalling provides the stories, which, in my opinion, are sometimes even more valuable then the photos!
Luke and I will be blogging our holiday over at our personal blog, and Number 19 will be taking a short, 12 day break. But we’ll be back up and running on the 14th with an update on how our August Brown Owls meeting went!
