Travel Diaries

In May, while in the Miami airport, I was browsing the book section of Hudson News.

Impressed by the selection, it was difficult to resist adding to my carry-on luggage which already included three books (and my husband’s contained three more) for a nine day trip.

Rick Steves’s book On The Hippie Trail beckoned, largely due to the photo-heavy format with pics taken with his Pentax K1000, rationing film to only nine photos per day. Imagine that! I told myself I’d pick up the book on the return connection.

I love travel writing. Life is short and our planet is large. There are many places that I know I won’t have the time, money, or ability to visit. But Steves’s account offered something more. Time travel. It was the last year that it was possible, much less safe, to travel the Hippie Trail through countries like Iran and Afghanistan. This book was a journey back to the 1970s, when there were no cell phones or GPS and such a life-altering pilgrimage was attainable on the salary of a twenty-three year old piano teacher. 

I tried to write my first travel diary when I was six, only a couple of years after Rick Steves’s saga. My intent was to recount a Girl Scout field trip to the Mystic Seaport & Aquarium, one of many childhood experiences that spurned my passion for marine animals and the sea. Well, I got three pages in and realized I wasn’t up to the task of illustrating the complicated rigging of the big ships, nor did I remember the names of all the fish I’d ogled. 

A few years later, my father decided we should drive across the country to visit two of my half-sisters who were living on the west coast. Always eager to max out the public school’s permissible number of absences, my parents knew this would be an opportunity for me to see some rural parts of the United States away from my native New York and New England. My mother diligently helped me keep a travel log for maybe the first half of the trip, imagining I’d present it to my teacher as evidence of what I’d learned. I was far more interested in playing my new portable Pac-Man game (when I wasn’t suffering from motion sickness) than expounding upon purchasing state pennants at every highway rest stop or seeing my first wild saguaro.

I did love standing in four states at once and I was absolutely entranced with the Mesa Verde ruins and the Grand Canyon, but mostly I was a reticent nine year old lounging in the back seat, probably asking how much longer we’d be driving each day.

Aside from the occasional TinTin adventure, I don’t recall reading any specific travel literature as a young child. What I really enjoyed was poring over maps. Paging through atlases, unfolding detailed gas station maps until they became worn at the seams, and drawing my own maps could keep me occupied for hours. In my opinion, any book with a map in the front was automatically superior.

When my own kids were young, they adored the fictional Magic Treehouse series, which introduced them to many locations around the globe. I offered my old globe to teach them geography, as well as the book Maps, by Alexsandra and Daniel Mizielinska. But the digital world was creeping into their lives, replacing tangible topographic maps, first with tools like MapQuest, and ultimately GoogleMaps. With Google StreetView, they could visit almost anywhere in the world with roads.

Scrapbooking became my preferred method to document our travels when the kids were young. Even if I didn’t have time to write longhand while on the go, I could print out a few photos and get artsy with them once the kids were in bed at night. As they got older, even this habit became too time consuming. I returned to reading, because it was easy to pick up a book and set it down, even if I’d only read a paragraph.

As I discovered more books in the non-fiction genre of travel writing, I breezed through favorites such as Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods (and his other humorous travel titles), The Cat Who Covered The World, by Christopher S. Wren, and Sailing Alone Around The World, by Joshua Slocum.

I have a distinct enthusiasm for nautical titles. There are a plethora of sailing logs to enjoy, both present day and historical, such as the Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin, Swell, by Liz Clark, or Three Years In A 12-Foot Boat, by Stephen G. Ladd.

As we returned to Belize last month, I fully intended to keep a travel journal. After three planes and a day that began at 02:30, we provisioned the boat and endured the required chart briefing for renting and captaining a sailboat in the Gulf of Honduras. I’d brought felt tip pens, colored pencils, even a small set of watercolor paints. And then I did nothing with them. Yes, I could turn the photos I took into a photobook online. I can create a YouTube video of underwater footage from coral reefs and mangroves. But there’s something about putting pen to paper and writing down the details of a trip that makes them come alive in my memory. Perhaps, next time?

Tell me how you document your travels!

Want more reading suggestions? Goodreads has a 300+ list of great travel books!