Travel Journaling

When this post goes up, I will be on my honeymoon. So it makes sense that I am blatantly admitting to writing it early.

So I thought I would talk about journaling while abroad.

When I first did this, I decided that the little details about being in new places faded quickly for me. So when I tried to call up a memory of what it was like to be in, say, Rome, I couldn’t quire remember. When I couldn’t remember, even though I had been there, I felt that I couldn’t possibly write about Rome.

My first experience with travel writing, I wrote every detail of the place I visited as it stood out to me on the back of a postcard for that place. For example, I wrote all about Rome, with details like the massive amount of cigarette butts that lined the cobblestone grout of the streets–things that really really stood out as different from my Canadian, paved-city upbringing, and I mailed the postcard back to myself.

It worked well and I tried not to think of the confused looks of the mail carriers and post workers reading my random smatterings of odd facts and people profiling abroad, mailed to a seemingly innocuous Canadian address.

This was nice for research but I found myself stopping, staring at some detail and getting a story idea.

In Venice, I saw a glass rose in a storefront and I became enraptured with the idea of a teen gifting that rose, including thorns. I thought of a fantasy world with female gondoliers and trade secrets.

Cue me running into a store, finding an Italian paper journal with a Florentine paper print (which I loved but was not typical for Venice–I justified it but knowing I was going to Florence after Milan but before Rome in that same trip) and madly writing while my mother and then-girlfriend-now-wife impatiently tapped their toes. Gelato stops, I was writing. Between the primo portion of dinner and the insalata, I scribbled an idea down.

This journal is still in use. It has so far achieves most of its word count while on trains in Europe or buses in the US. There is the occasional train ticket stuffed into the pages. There are title pages for each new place I visit.

While on my honeymoon, I might be writing in it. I might be writing in a new journal, retiring the handmade beauty before the cover becomes too bare of its gold ink. But I will be writing.