Have you seen my travel journal?

You will have to look hard because I don’t have one – and I think I am not alone.

Over the weekend I popped into Chapters for a quick browse and was intrigued to see a whole table with beautiful journals specifically for people to record their travel adventures.  Some came equipped with handy little pens on the side and cute titles such as this –

It’s a great thought – just picking up that book and holding it made me feel like I should go travelling.  Imagine the stories I could fill this book with.

• Like the time our Italian taxi driver started crying  Read the post
• Like the time I slept in a telephone booth in Dallas
• Like the time I found someone’s undies in the drawer of the hotel room I just checked into
• Like the time the taxi driver ran out of petrol while driving around the Arc de Triomf in Paris rush hour …. (was it “cochon” that he shouted?)

Sadly – or not – it seems that travel stories have now migrated to the internet.  Do you remember when you first heard the word blog?  Actually short for weblog as in…

A blog (a truncation of the expression “weblog”) is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (“posts”).

The blog then became the vlog when it seems the written word was not good enough and we migrated to video – thanks to youtube.  Frankly I think that is a horrible word – Vlog.  Yuk!

What’s puzzling to me is that there is obviously still a market for travel journals otherwise the wise folks at Chapters wouldn’t be investing shelf space for them.  So somebody is buying them.  Are they bought as gifts for other people only to be relegated to a shelf at the back of the closet or … even worse …. re-gifted??

I am sure (and I hope) that I will get comments from people who have religiously filled up many of these books with their travel stories.  I also hope that they get to keep them and share them with others.  For me a blog is the best way to go – it’s easy to store (in the cloud) and while others might not want to read them they do help preserve memories for me of the funny, terrifying, lovely and absolutely fabulous things that can happen when you travel.