How to Keep a Travel Journal

Next week, I fly out to Europe, and I have my new red Moleskin sitting next to me as I write this. I am designating this small notebook as my travel journal for the duration of my trip, which will be about a month. I won’t have a laptop the entire time, but I hope to fill this journal as I fly, train, and bus between countries and cities. Keeping a travel journal will hopefully make the trip last far beyond its days on the calendar.

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a form of documenting the trip 🙂

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The First Travel Journal

The idea of writing on the road is a romantic ideal that has propagated over the centuries thanks to travelogues of adults finding themselves near and far. (Eat Pray Love meets Christopher Columbus) Regardless if my work becomes a best seller or a historical monument, writing has always been my companion to process the my anxieties and spin my own narrative on the tribulations of daily life. as I grow older, it is actually wonderful to dwell on the problems that plagued me years ago, now that they have gone up in smoke. When I read my old writing, I wink to an audience off-camera, slyly knowing that the problems that seemed big at the time didn’t quite matter after all. Keeping a travel journal is a message to my future self, a time capsule into my mind and the world around me via the intangible.

if you took a peek into the 5×5 Ikea cube shelf that covers an entire wall in my room, it is filled with novels, self-help books, and journals. each little box holds its own category: fantasy, product, time management, novels, books about writing, and my journals. I have a wide array of journals that were collected over the years at college and work events, or small artistic journals procured from tourist shops. Although I keeping coming back to Moleskine, these Muji notebooks will do, but in a real pinch, I will write on graph paper or sticky notes. Those writings are likely gone forever, but sometimes unloading is the point.

I wish I could say that I wrote a diary ever since I was little. I did write some One Direction fanfiction in high school, but as far as journaling my thoughts, I only ever tried to write a diary without consistency. It was only in college when I started to consistently write. In college, I unlocked using it for musings, to-do lists, and analysis of my emotions. I wanted to figure out who I was. Maybe each page is a little chip in the marble of my personality, and only when I am an eclectic 80-year-old lady will I emerge like David, fully developed. I have gotten a little closer to who this version of Alyssa wants to be.

Documenting My Life

My senior year of college I learned how to do lots of little solo trips visiting my friends across the US. Many of my besties had graduated the year before, and I missed them, so I visited them in various cities across the US. I had so much time on my hands, and I love drawing and editing videos, that I made a lot of CapCuts of what I did on these trips. I would not say these were the attention-grabbing, SEO, killer TikToks I should have been making, but a home-video-style documentary of exactly what I did. Less emotion, more silliness in what I was doing.

Looking back with nostalgia’s sweet lens: I am adorable, not a dork. I documented apple picking and walking across Boston to see my friend. I walked all across the Charles on the day of the Head of the Charles, and it was just so refreshing to see the bright blue sky mixed with the fall leaves on a river filled with racing shells. It kind of triggered something in me—that documenting the journey, truly celebrating it by sharing it with my friends and family, allows me to re-live it twice. Once in real life, and again through my memories. So from there, I was determined to start writing and photographing my trips, so I could at least celebrate for future Alyssa.

Documenting my journey is the best gift I can give future Alyssa. I recently wrote a post called Best Tips for Your First Time Backpacking in Europe!, which was based on a note I had actually written three years ago. When I started my backpacking trip in Europe, I was so scared. I remember being jet-lagged and anxious, staring at the ceiling at 4 am, unable to relax or go to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about how nervous I was if something would go wrong. Even though I was so excited for the adventure, it felt like now that I was finally there, I could not breathe in and enjoy the moment.

What Was I So worried About?

The previous month had been a whirlwind. I was finishing exams, final projects, and finishing up at my research job and part-time software job. I moved out of my apartment, and attended goodbye parties put on by the school, friends, and bars. Finally, I had to actually graduate and all my friends and family came into town to celebrate. The entire final semester of school was a staircase, where I started with doing my final selection of classes, and ended with this “new state” of having a degree. It was awesome and intense, but everything was a little step I had to take to actually say that I have graduated college. And what did “graduated college” even look like? I had planned this big Europe trip for months ahead of time, but there were so many obstacles and final exams to do so that getting there was abstract and hand-wavy.

Closing my eyes, I can remember this so clearly. 1. I journaled a lot. 2. I was into making YouTube videos at the time, so I was enjoying video editing. 3. I worked out at the stadium a lot, which meant I was always walking up and down the stairs at the UF (go gata) stadium that was a 10-minute jog from my house. I quite literally was going up and down stairs all the time my final semester at school.

I was lying on my bed in my hotel room in Paris, a gift from my friend’s parents to us as part of our big trip. She was asleep, and I was just staring at the ceiling in disbelief that I was in Paris and that I wouldn’t get home until June 16th, which was 5 weeks later (that is 3 years to this day, actually). I was also staring at the ceiling in terror that what if bad things happened and I lost my passport or spent all my money? I could not get myself out of that terror loop that night, tossing and turning, anxious in Paris. The following day, I drank a lot of coffee to make up for my lack of sleep.

The very next day, after checking out of the hotel and into the hostel, I suddenly relaxed. I suddenly got the vibe of Paris and the trip and finally mellowed out into the explorer-adventurer person I wanted to be, and realized that this unsureness and excitement was the point of the trip. I wanted to be brave in places I hadn’t been before. Also, I met new people and drank a lot with an old friend. I also finally got a full night of sleep.

When writing my original guide, I had to go back and look at all the photos I took of myself to see what I looked like and what I was feeling at the time. I went through all my old Notion and iPhone notes to see what I was thinking. I had actually written out so many little tidbits—guides to other backpackers, guides to people doing backpacking trips later, a list of little memories, and a ranking of my favorite sirens. I took so many videos from this trip, just sitting on my phone, waiting to one day be posted. instead, it is for me.

growing up

It is a little ridiculous realizing how much you have grown over time. It feels like someone gave me a nice hug, held my hand, and let me know that everything is going to be okay. That I survived this hard thing, or in reality, something I perceived as hard, and life continues. I still get anxious and scared about doing the wrong thing and trapped in overthinking mind loops, but I can get out of it quicker. I trust that I have to feel the feelings, but it is more important to take action to get out of the loop (even if that action is doing yoga and taking deep breaths). I also am so happy that traveling has become so regular and special to me. That little anxious dork in that hotel room now travels regularly for work (like next week!)! At the time, traveling to Europe felt like one of the riskiest things I had ever done—coming from the girl that would drive up every weekend to North Carolina to go backpacking and make it home by Monday morning before class.

Now, I am so much more confident in myself and my abilities to quickly problem solve while abroad. My type B girlies are probably just born chilling, but it took a few times to get my training wheels off. I understand how to book hotels, hostels, and everything in between, and I know how to get the information I need. I know that I am capable of just walking around and exploring a city with no plans, but I also like a good tour or two. I prefer quick solo stints if I am in a place briefly and can make it work in between destinations, but I find going with a friend makes everything more fun. My favorite part of growing up is learning more about what I like, domestic and abroad. It is having faith in myself and my choices, as I grow more confident that this is the path I want to be on, not a path I am exploring.

The Struggles of a Travel Journal

Even with everything you are doing on your adventures, it can be hard to translate this into writing. Better put, after eating, swimming, drinking, looking, and scampering, it can be hard to put your full life onto the page. People often turn to writing when they are struggling with something big. People on an enjoyable sun-kissed vacation struggle with choosing a margarita or an aperol spritz.

In creative droughts, I have to give myself structure. Yes, you could follow the Artist’s Way and do three pages every day, but when traveling, even that feels too vague to give a real output that isn’t a list of what you ate, saw, and heard that day. I am more creative and generate more creative output if I am given a framework of how to be creative, regardless of whether this is a work project or a personal one. It is like that whole goals vs. systems thing that James Clear writes about in productivity circles—essentially, goals are about the direction you want to go, but systems are the actual daily processes that get you there. Giving yourself scaffolding makes it easier to find the boundaries and something to leap off of. When you don’t have any structure, it can be hard to feel creative. What used to happen is that I felt compelled to write a line-by-line essay on exactly what I did that day, which is really boring to write, even if you just swam in Lake Bled. Making your travelogue is supposed to be fun, so that your future self can breathe in the Mediterranean again. But often, like many people trying to diary for the first time, you get bogged down by a line-item list. Like, “I just lived it, why am I cataloging everything I am doing like I am running an experiment in a lab!?!”

The Power of Sensory Grounding: What the Research Says

when I stopped writing a historical record and started focusing on details of what I experienced, I felt inspired to write, and I can think about some of these glimpses like they happened an hour ago. Writing, instead of relying on the thousands of photos I took and have never looked at again, actually takes me back to the experience. Research on the photo-taking-impairment effect by Dr. Linda Henkel shows that when we just snap pictures of everything, our brains actually offload the memory and forget the details. Zooming in on one specific detail makes it much easier to call it back. Writing down the physical, sensory textures of a day—whether it was the wind coming off the Mediterranean Sea, the annoying lights that would blast our eyeballs every time the bus stopped on an overnight bus trip, or even the smell of puke outside the Budapest club—brings me back there more than re-reading the emails I received when planning the trip. It forces my brain to actively process the environment and everything I experienced. Similarly, clinical studies by Dr. James Pennebaker show that expressive writing literally shifts my brain out of anxiety-induced loops and helps consolidate long-term memories in a way that a dry list of tasks never could.

In her classic essay On Keeping a Notebook, Joan Didion wrote that the point of keeping a notebook is never to have an accurate factual record of what you have been doing. Instead, she wrote, the point is to “remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” In some ways, when I looked through my notes and my photos many years later, it didn’t feel like I was reading my own words, but the words of a loved character, one that I was deeply invested in. I had become the narrative version of Alyssa, and my notebooks let me remember what it was like to be me.

Cheers to you and your many adventures, wherever they may end up!

So, for everyone who wants a little inspiration in figuring out what to write about to help their future selves or even write their own blog posts, I put together my master list of 45 Creative Travel Journaling Prompts to give you the exact scaffolding you need to start.

My Travel Journal Recommendations

Exercise your free will: use the notes app on your phone, a dedicated travel app, or a journal. I use a mix of both given that I may not always have consistent light or downtime at a table, but I always have my phone on me. My notes are for me to process my experience, so it doesn’t totally matter. It is your life.

I have picked up journals and pens on my travels as a cool souvenir, but I usually find the quality much lower than if I intentionally researched and bought a journal ahead of time. (I really wish it was the opposite, but part of decreasing consumption is not buying bad versions of things you know you have to replace) Key thing: Bring a journal that works for you & your trip, not what seems trendy.

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