Due to an accident involving my journal from Scandinavia and Russia and water, I've been rewriting that travel journal. While reading it I started to notice a change in what and how I wrote in my journal.
On my first trip with Contiki I did my first version of a travel journal - I wrote in my palm pilot all the things I saw, in the form of a list. I'm pretty sure I had fun on that trip on top of seeing a bunch of stuff. When I went on the European Discovery trip I was a little more advanced. It's a very detailed list in sentence form of things that happened, people I met, things I saw with the occasional interjection of my opinion on something. In Scandinavia things continued this way for the most part, but I also started to comment on how beautiful things were, which is always hard to express - it's just beautiful - how many ways can you say that? Once I got into Russia I started to notice that my journal entries started to include more stuff about how I felt, observations about the country and the people. It really struck me, I was evloving as a journal writer. Or maybe I was just evolving as a traveler? I'll discuss that another day. I was intruged by this change and looked at my journal from Egypt and, WOW! I found that I included all the stuff that I did during the day, but I was also observing so much of what was going on around me and writing about it and how I felt about it. No wonder I was always behind in writing in that trip. But it's so refreshing to see what I thought about things at the time, especially about a trip that was so precious to me.
Journaling while traveling can be a total pain in the butt, it takes time, you're always forgetting to add something, or your on a bus and hit a bump when you're writing - it's work. But when you come back home it's so nice to have something that helps you remember what you did and how you felt. Many memories will stay with you, but sometimes you need something to trigger those memories. You're pictures will also help, but they wont tell you what you thought or felt at a time, they'll just show you what you saw and did. So keep a journal, you'll be happy you did.
