A Quick and Easy Travel Journal

I have always been one to keep a journal when I travel.  I have done this lots of different ways over the years, such as a diary, a scrapbook, a digital photo book, and last year I even published part of my Cook Islands travel journal on my blog!  This week we are going to Exmouth in Western Australia to spend some time with my beautiful sister-in-law and her hubby and our gorgeous nephew. 

I decided that I wanted to take along our Macbook, to do a digital photo book of the holiday.  I did this last year when we went on a week-long camping trip, each night I spent some time uploading the photos and recording some journalling of our day's adventures.  I really enjoyed this evening ritual, I find that writing about an event helps me to re-live it, which makes it that much more special.  The added bonus was that it was so great to come home with a completed photo book/journal.  I have countless holiday books/journals that are incomplete because I never get around to finishing them once we are back home.

I love iPhoto to make my digital photo books, because not only can I create a DVD, with a slide show to music, of our memories, but I can also order a hard copy of the book to keep too!  It is such a simple program to use, and has great photo editing tools too.  The only down-side to these photo books is that there is not a whole lot of room for journalling - and I am sure that you have all noticed that I like to 'talk'!

So, when I recently saw this article on a Travel Planner Binder by Aby Garvey from Simplify 101, I thought I would give this new system a whirl...  I bought an A5 binder and pockets from Officeworks, and dug out some 'travel' embellishments that my sister had given me last year (thanks Loui!) to use for scrapbooking another holiday (which I obviously haven't done yet!).

A little printing and gluing, and here is my little binder for my upcoming Exmouth holiday!  I have printed out two pages per day, as per Aby's instructions, which I will file into sleeves on the plane. 

I also have a plastic sleeve with scraps of paper, photo borders and pockets to decorate the pages with, as I go.  I decided not to do the embellishing before I left home, rather I will wait and see what size/type of memorabila I collect, and decorate around what I have when I feel creative. 

So, basically I am going to use this binder for journalling and for storing memorabilia that we collect along the journey.  I will also do a digital photo book to store all of our photos from the trip.  I guess it might sound like over-kill, having two 'travel books' but I really want a system that will allow me to complete my holiday memories by the time we get home, so I am going to give it a try!

Goodbye winter on the Gold Coast... hello warm weather on the picturesque Ningaloo Reef!