Travel Journal

A year ago, I splurged on a Midori Travel Journal. My first venture out with it was to the Canadian Rockies, and now that I’ve posted the Project Life pages for that trip, I thought I’d share the travel journal.

The cover is leather, and gets more worn-looking (and lovely) over time. I bought the pen clip and uses some stickers to put my initials on the front. They’ve held up very well, but can be easily replaced if they start to get ragged looking. One of the things I like the most about the Midori are all the choices you have for inserts. I’ve always been a big fan of graph paper so that’s what I chose. I also had a watercolor paper booklet behind it, but I’ve not gotten to the point where I’m sketching while traveling often enough to make good use of it.

I used an old camera charm from my stash for the title page. I wasn’t sure if it would interfere with writing in the journal, but it didn’t. I put a dash after the July date, but filled up enough of the first book, that I started a new book for 2016.

The first couple of pages were devoted to the itinerary. Since we had to book our hotels way in advance, the itinerary didn’t change much.

One of the things I love about this journal is I finally committed to putting in some memorabilia along with a recap of our day. I also bought an Instax Smartphone printer. I was wishing for one so I could include photos in the journal, and Matt kindly gave me a gift certificate to Amazon for my birthday which made it affordable. Here I combined a business card as well as a photo from the Three Sisters cafe.

Here I added another photo, and cut out the portion of the trail guide for our hike around the three lakes at Many Glacier.

Thanks to Melissa, we knew to get ice cream at Cows in Banff. I didn’t take a photo so I drew a sketch instead. I added a piece of Washi tape to the bottom for a little color.

Another sketch (of my backpack) for our longest day of hiking in Yoho National Park, and two of my favorite photos from the day.

I included a portion of a business card from my favorite shop in Jasper. I bought several gifts there as well as a scarf and necklace for myself. The prices were amazingly low for such nice products. On the second page, I cut out a portion of the flyer about the Glacier Adventure tour.

I wrote all the journaling for our trip from Jasper back to Calgary and totally forgot to add the bookmark from the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, so I adhered it to the margin with some score-tape which worked out great.

The other add-on I purchased was this zipper envelope which held some items I thought I might use as well as the business cards and other memorabilia that ended up in the journal.

This year we don’t have any “big” trips planned, but there are trips to Florida and Chicago for sure, and several other weekend trips this summer. I think just one of the graph books will be enough to cover the year, but another advantage of the Midori is I can always add another books. I love that the format is small enough to fit in either a purse or my tote bag, and I find it pretty easy to sit down each night and get the day’s events recorded.