Travel Journaling Tips for 2021
Hi guys! It has been a while since we shared any tips for personal use! So, let’s imagine that in 2021, all state borders will be finally open for travelers and we’ll be able to visit even the farthest corners of Earth.
In this piece we want to talk about traveling and how to use technology to plan it, keep on track, create budget and put down expenses and maybe even keep a journal.
Did you know, that half of the pleasure is in the anticipation of it? Plan and get ready for these trips in advance, imagining pleasant moments will lift your mood and can help you relax.
Travel Journals… What Are They?
A travel journal is a place where you keep all your plans and memories of future and past trips. It is a special collection of impressions, funny stories, fascinating facts and discoveries about places you have visited.
This journal can be digital and physical, everyone decides for themselves. Still, we at Collabio Spaces believe that having a digital journal has more benefits, as your phone is with you all the time anyway. It takes less space and you don’t need to carry around pens, pencils, notebooks, scissors, envelopes and other things in your luggage bag.
We can even bet that everyone has at least once written some travel notes in a note-taking app or an email (Instagram counts!). Anyway, if you want to keep this tradition and recall these pleasant moments in several years, try to be consistent and put everything in one place.
Your Journal in Collabio Spaces
If you decided to have a digital journal, you’re on the right track! Let’s see how Collabio Spaces and its magical cloudless P2P collaboration helps travelers all around the world!
1. Planning
Sweet time… You’re get together with friends or loved ones and imagine your next trip. Create a document in the app and write down the main checkpoints, then add more places to visit and try to calculate how much time is needed to reach every point.
At the same time, your friend searches for images and adds them to your file via P2P collaboration. Another friend is contributing with ideas on hotels and car rentals. Everything you need is to provide them a passcode to your document. You all see the changes simultaneously and can check the ideas and agree on the best plan. In the end, you’ll have a full strategy and tactics for the upcoming adventures! What more, you will have access to the document off-line, so you will always be able to find the address of your stay or lunch. Grand!
2. Budgeting
After you know everything about the places you’ll visit, create a spreadsheet with your expenses. You can start it on your own and update it throughout the journey with your friends, whenever one pays for the whole group. Collabio Spaces allows off-line collaboration, so you can do this right away anywhere and nothing will be forgotten!
So, when you’re on your way to new sights on a train or a car, share the spreadsheet with friends and let them fill it in. Do not spend time manually calculating costs, leave it to the a smart app. ;)
3. Keeping Impressions
Are you traveling with your better half? Do you cherish every time you get a chance for a getaway trip? You can write a diary of your journey together. All of your impressions and emotions will be stored forever.
When you have a moment, be it a visit to a cafe or a long road to another sight, share your travel journal with your partner and let them add their part to it. Lack of the Internet connection or an expensive roaming is not an issue with cloudless P2P collaboration.
Why to Keep a Travel Journal Except for Planing?
Sure, this is not obligatory but there are a lot of advantages!
- Memories. If you don’t write them down, they will pass away, “like tears in rain”. Having even a couple of sentences will help you save impressions in a five-senses dimension. Imagine how cool it is to go back to the past and find yourself in the middle of former adventures once again!
- Knowledge. When you travel, you discover fascinating facts about foreign cultures, people, traditions, and the way of life in general. Keeping your observations in a journal will help you dive deeper into other worlds. You may want to come back to something and find out more, your journal will remind you of that.
- Creativity. Traveling is a great booster for your motivation and inspiration. When you write down what amazed you, you get one more tool for getting more creative sparks in the future. You can see a detail of a house, that you would like to build for yourself or taste a dish, that you could make at home. Journeys introduce us to new things, besides, when you are on a vacation, your mind is free to notice more. Would be a pity to lose all that right after you come back.
- Gratitude. This is what makes us happy. When you are down, look through the pictures and read about your happy memories, it will help to put things in perspective and make you feel happier!
- Planning. A travel journal might help you to get ready for the next adventure. Do you like to plan your travels or do you just come to the destination and take it from there? Both ways, we are sure you could benefit from planning in your journal. It can be as simple as a place where you keep your reservations and tickets or it can be much more elaborate, including where you will be eating and what you want to wear that day. You can later track your decisions and outcomes so that you don’t repeat the same mistakes. If you like to give feedback for services you used, this is a perfect place to make notes.
5 Tips for Keeping a Travel Journal
1. Start a Journal Before Your Trip
- Create a checklist to not forget anything.
- Plan your route and list the sights you have to see for sure and those that you will be able to visit if there is some free time left.
- Find places to stay and write down address and contacts.
- What else will you need? Fancy restaurant booking, car for rental, train tickets…
Collect all your expectations from the trip and you’ll be able to evaluate how good your preparations were and what you need to focus on next time.
2. Write Your Ideas, Impressions and Thoughts During the Trip
These may be short journal entries or entire stories about your adventures. If you have time, you can collect every detail of your wonderful day before going to sleep. If you’re short of time, just write down keywords so that you can remember everything later and expand the story.
Don’t forget about important little things. For example, the color of the sunset, clothes others were wearing that day, the smell of national cuisine, the cozy room in a restaurant or the art on your coffee in the morning… Write down anything that can bring you back there!
Pay great attention to the people who surround you, the architecture, music, smells, and so on.
3. Illustrate Your Journal with Pictures
We bet you have hundreds or even thousands of pictures after coming from a trip. Well, choosing the best 7–8 pictures for your journal is a good practice. Look at all your photos once more and decide which several ones describe your day the best.
Why don’t we recommend picking up more photos? You’ll still have them on your phone/in the cloud, so there’s no sense to copy them to the journal. You can then also post those pictures with parts of your journal on social media, we are sure that your friends will love to read about your impressions of the destination you visited and adventures you had.
When you look through an illustrated journal entry in even 10 years, these images will evoke the most vivid memories!
4. Analyse the Trip after It Is Over
Better do this in a day or two after coming home or during a conversation with your travel buddies. Drawing some conclusions will help you set impressions in your memories. It is always interesting to find out, what made the biggest impression on your friend and how different or similar your impressions are. Answer the following:
- What did you like the most and the least?
- What else was great?
- What would you change from your today’s level of experience?
- What did surprise you during the trip?
- What would you like to do again?
Think of yourself during your travel. How did you feel at different destination points? This exercise allows you to learn more about your personal preferences, which makes every travel better and makes you happy!
5. Create a Short Travel Guide for Others
Once you’re writing a travel journal, why not share it with others? You can collect ideas for your future trips from others’ journals and share yours to help people get the most from visiting new places.
Maybe your friends will want to visit the same place. What would you recommend them to have a look at? Which sights are must-haves and which can be omitted? Share any shortcuts and advice on accommodation. Next, share this post in your personal blog or on socials.
And don’t forget to keep safe! The pandemic is not over yet, so stay in a safe distance from others. Hopefully, these limits will pass away together with the virus when the world has a working vaccine. ;) Wе’ll see, and now we can just imagine and visualise our future travels, which is awesome as well!
