Travel Journal tip 2 from on the road

Travel Journal tip 2 is a quick simple thing that you can do to enhance your travel journal while you are travelling. It will not  take up too much time, does not require a particular skill or needs much in the way of equipment.

Ok so what is my travel journal tip 2? One of the first things I do when I land in a new city is to visit the tourist information office. Most places are only too keen to promote  their city and these services have been set up in order to sell you tours of one sort or another. That’s fine but it is not the reason I visit them. Usually these offices are full of glossy leaflets and brochures and it is these I am after.

I love ephemera! I do look at what activities they promote  but usually I have done the research and know what I want to see and do. In fact I actively look for leaflets etc on the galleries, museums and places I want to visit. Sometimes you will find this material in the hotel lobby. Other places to look is bus depots and train stations. I usually gather together a number of brochures about the place anything like a “What’s on” booklet or sheet and leaflets about the places I know I want to go to. All this material in then stuffed in my bag and I take the haul of ephemera back to where we are staying.

During our visit to the city when, we go to a place I check if there is a brochure available promoting it in my ephemera stash. If there is I have a Bingo moment as when I write about the visit I have instant page decoration available.

All I need to do is cut out the image and with a glue stick paste it into my book. Then I write up the day and I have a finished page.

That is it – simple and quick! Using ephemera in your travel journal is easy and free. More to the point you can only find it in the place you visit and at that time. If you returned to the same city the following year differnet promotional would be running and you would have totally different material to work with.

No special skills are required and the equipment list is simple. All it takes is a glue stick and scissors and you have a way of decorating your page.

I hope you have fun with my travel journal tip 2. Of course, there is much more in the way of ephemera that you can add to your travel journal. Tickets, business cards, empty sugar packets, packaging of all sorts, gallery passes, receipts – the list goes on. Once you start using ephemera in your travel journal you will notice more and more things that can be used. All of it captures a sense of place at a particular time.

The idea behind these travel journal tips is that they are quick easy things you can do while on the road. Each enhance your travel journal in a small way and by the end of your trip you have a journal that reflects your experience.

These tips are all things I do in my own travel journal and the examples I share are real life samples of something done while traveling. In other words they are real rather than polished or perfect. I hope you have found travel journal tip 2 useful!

See Travel journal tip 1 for the first in this series

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