How to Journal While You’re Actually Travelling (Not After)
Have you ever been standing in front of something both foreign and extraordinary and been thinking, “I need to remember this,” and then you only capture a 2-dimensional image but don’t write anything down? Not because you don’t want to write anything down or don’t have anything meaningful to say. But because being in the moment doesn’t always come with a convenient pause button to stop and give yourself time to write it down.
Most journaling advice often holds the assumption that you have a quiet hour and a clear mind whenever you want to write. And this can be more true for journaling in general, in your day-to-day life. The context of travel conflicts with that assumption, though, since any traveller knows a trip is usually an on-the-go adventure with constant movement and very little break time where you can focus solely on creating the space and mindset to write something meaningful.
For many people, they adapt to a writing method of just journaling after. Say on the flight home, or in pieces in your hotel at the end of a tiring day. The catch is that by the time you’re actually sitting down to write down your story, the specific details, like the smell in the air, the exact thing someone said to you, or the feeling you had that particular afternoon, have already started to smooth out into a mental highlight reel. This version of the story, written even days later, is true, but it isn’t accurate. Accuracy and detail are very important to producing a piece of text that carries intellectual meaning.
In anthropology, there is a concept called thick description. It is a term coined by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz to describe the difference between recording what happens and recording what it actually means. A thin description of a man winking is just that: a man closing and opening one eye. However, a thick description captures the context too. Who is the man winking at, what is it signalling between them and their shared culture. The recorded experience, or data set, is the same, but the richness is entirely different. Travel memories work the same way. A photo of a cobblestone street is the thin description version: accurate, but stripped of its context. A thick description of this street is the detail you actually noticed while you were standing on the stones, the fact that it started to rain, or how the uneven stones felt after you’d been walking for three hours. That version of the experience doesn’t often survive the whole day to be recorded at the end of the day, let alone make it all the way home from the trip with you. It has to be written down while the context is still alive, before the wink becomes just a blink.
The honest answer that I have found helps me the most with keeping rich records of my travels is that you can’t just do one thing in terms of how you are collecting your records. You don’t just do one thing to capture your memories; you do several things at different effort levels depending on what the day allows you, creating a layered system of memory keeping. What your layered system looks like is completely unique to you and will develop and evolve over time. For me, right now, these are the different practices I prepare for to collect the full living story:
The Physical Journal- this is not the space for my full writing and reflections. The physical journal is for quick notes and creating a timeline I can reference later. It’s a way of anchoring the overall day and even a whole trip to help index your memories as dates, times, and one-line reminders of what happened when. Like the skeleton of my experiences.
Digital Pins and Photos- these are also captured in the moment. When something is worth remembering but there’s no time to write it down. In my digital journal, which I can access from my phone or iPad, I can quickly pin a journal entry on the Global Map with a couple photos. It is a way of bookmarking a specific moment as a reminder for future me that something meaningful happened where or when I took this photo on the map. There is no pressure to actually write anything.
Rant On-The-Go- One thing I love about having a digital travel journal is that I can utilize voice-to-text features on my phone in my digital journal to capture my raw and unfiltered observations and thoughts, without the filter of putting the words together formally on paper. This is actually a practice anthropologists use to record their immediate responses to experiences or the responses of those around them they are studying. Not only is this convenient because it can be done on the walk from the museum to the cafe, or while waiting for a train, but it also can capture meaningful insights that get silenced when you feel the pressure of producing a proper piece of writing.
The Junk Journal Collection- Probably my favourite part is the way I capture the physical context. The physical ephemera you come across throughout your travels- receipts, business cards, wrappers, tickets, tags, etc, that becomes a tactile memory trigger for later. This junk can often make you remember things no photo would and gives you unique creative materials to use in visual memory keeping. I don’t actually use the ‘junk’ in my junk journal while I am travelling, but I’m always keeping an eye out for junk I can collect. And I store it all for my journey home where I can organize it, match it with photos and other crafty supplies to create art that reflects my memories and experiences.
The End-of-Day Entry- My only form of long and thought-out writing is my reflection entry in my digital journal at the end of the day. This is for when I am decompressing from the buzz of the day, starting to relax back at my accommodations. In that safe, comfortable space, both physically and mentally, I can formulate my full reflection. The actual writing happens, but I can pull from all of the little bookmarks and reminders I have created for myself in small moments throughout the day. I have the convenience of typing using a keyboard so I can let my full thoughts flow with no possibility of being rushed.
Now knowing a system does not instantly mean in practice everything operates as a smooth operation, because we aren’t meant to be robots producing bland stories. There will still be obstacles, things that will get in the way of contributing to the various layers of your journaling system. For me, two major, ongoing things get in my way, and I am actively working on trying to eliminate these obstacles.
The Pressure to Make It Perfect- Especially as I began to expose myself more to the journaling community, I started to experience a feeling of inferiority because my journal pages were never coming out as these clean, aesthetic pages with no evidence of error or backtracking. I had to face it: I am not a type A writer, and probably never will be. I won’t be prepping out my month of journal pages in advance using a colour-coded pen system and a ruler to organize what goes where on a page. And even if I did, I know when it comes time to actually fill that page, I won’t have the pretty and legible handwriting that scrawls across the page neatly in those boxes without any smears from an eraser or my hand smudging the ink. And sometimes I just have more to say than what one page allows. The transition to a digital journal has been the most positive change for creating a better environment for my writing. When I type out my reflections, I can choose a font and don’t have to worry about my inconsistent handwriting or having to fit everything I want to say in a small box. A digital journal adapts to every entry you write. Not enough room? The box gets bigger. Want to change what you said? Erase it without a trace. The pressure of a perfect page is gone because the perfect page is no longer a preset box I have to fit my freeform thoughts inside of. Instead, my freeform writing is the roadmap for how my journal page should look, and they always fit together.
Not Knowing How Long A Page Will Take- Freeform writing creates this other prevalent barrier for me because the actual act of writing my reflection for the day can look very different from day-to-day. Sometimes a quick 5 minutes of devoted writing time is everything I need to dump all my thoughts on the page. This sort of writing block is easy to fit into most kinds of days. Whether I’m giving myself a mindful break from a jam-packed workday, or I’m using a short physical day from a 20k steps walking day in Europe. But, other days, when my reflections and experiences are not as easy to put into words and how I want to write about my day takes more mental effort. Meaning I need to give myself 45 minutes to an hour of devoted writing time. The solution I have been trying to implement for this variety in the writing process has been staying consistent with an end-of-day reflection page. Especially when I am actively travelling, because even if my writing block ends up being shorter, travel days are the hardest to stop and focus solely on writing during. My end-of-day entries have no length requirements, so some nights I get it all down in a paragraph, and some nights it feels like I have a novel to write down. But there’s no pressure to have the same output, since both products count in the end goal of more writing consistency while I am travelling.
When the system works, and it doesn’t have to work perfectly every single day to be an improvement overall, here’s what you come home with as the story woven by your travels.
A timeline. Not a curated highlight reel or a dump of out-of-context photos, but an actual record of the trip as it happened. With slow days of coffee in the park, the wrong turns or missed buses to round out the highlights that made it to Instagram. The bones of the whole trip are actually the who, what, where and when, held together by a handful of quick notes and jotted ideas in a physical journal that doesn’t have to look pretty because it was never trying to be.
A map full of pins, with every place you actually stood and thought I want to remember this, with a photo attached. Not the photos you took for anyone else, but the ones that were just for you. Like the blurry one of the menu because you want to remember what you ordered, or the one of the view through the window from your train seat. These photos and captured locations show nothing in particular, but somehow capture exactly what that afternoon felt like. Each pin a door back into a moment that would otherwise have become just a general impression of a place.
A small collection of junk that turns out to not be junk at all. The scrap of a receipt from the cafe you’ll probably never visit again, and the business card from the adorable bookshop you spent an hour in serve as physical objects that trigger specific memories in a way photographs somehow don’t. Maybe because you actually touched them while you were the version of yourself on that trip, carried them around and chose that they were worth keeping. When they could have just been thrown away. And when you get home, and you’ve settled back from the excitement of your adventure, they become a tangible way to revisit that sense of adventure when you get to create a unique page design in your junk journal using these scraps and whatever else helps tell the story of that day.
And finally, for most of the days of your trip, you have a full page entry. Not necessarily polished or edited, and definitely not written for anyone else. Just a retelling and reflection of that day, created from a safe and comfortable headspace primed to follow every line of thought and stray question because nothing was rushing this part of the process. The thick version of what happened, written while the context was still alive enough to get it right.
This gives you not a perfect journal, but a real one. Which is the only kind that’s actually worth keeping.
Although each layer of the total system carries a meaningful process for capturing your travel memories with intention, the end-of-day reflection is where the most meaningful writing happens. The Letters To Somewhere app is built for exactly that moment. When you are relaxing at the end of the day with no distractions, and you’re ready to reflect on your day and weave together the tapestry of all the little moments you collected. That’s when I open the app on my laptop or iPad. I’m not faced with any format to live up to, no length requirements, and no pressure to make it beautiful. Just a place to write the thick version of the story, before it starts to thin out overnight.
If you’d like to try it for yourself, you can find it here.
And if you’re still working out what your own system should look like, or you just want to read more about how other slow travellers are figuring it out, the Slow Travel Society is a monthly letter written in exactly that spirit. Giving the honest version of what intentional travel actually looks like, from someone still figuring it out alongside you.
