Illustrate your travels in a journal

Put together your pages and accessories to take along on your trip

By Rehana Begg

If you’re planning a trip with the kids this March break, you’re probably looking for activities to keep them occupied. Producing a personalized travel diary or journal is a great way to keep children of all ages entertained and is easy to create on your computer. It’s also a perfect pastime for those who love recording their travel memories and mementoes each vacation.

Start a travel-journal tradition

Keeping a journal doesn’t have to be complicated says Edward Wilkinson-Latham, an associate editor at Outpost magazine in Toronto, who wrote his first travel journal on a trip to Paris when he was eight. Mementoes such as bus tickets and Mexican candy wrappers have all made it into his journals because they “trigger memories of that culture and capture moments that videos and photographs don’t.”

For Heather Buchan, a Toronto-based freelance travel writer, selecting a suitable journal is as enticing as filling its pages. She treats herself to a beautiful journal before any extended vacation. “I try to choose one that reflects that particular trip,” she says. “So, for my trip through the South Pacific, I bought a journal with a turquoise cover that I felt was symbolic of the water.”

Splash colour onto a blank page

The key to making a journal exciting for kids is to give them access to fun and colourful tools, says Yhumna Moosa, a bank supervisor in Toronto. Moosa helped her eight-year-old nephew, Zeyadh, craft his travel journal on a trip to South Africa and logged numerous entries on a trip to Morocco on behalf of her three-year-old son, Osama.

“Younger children may not know where to start if you give them a blank book,” she says. “They follow by example, so you should keep your own journal and also give them easy-to-follow directions.”

Piece together your journal

Homemade journals serve as flexible and cost-effective educational tools that encourage creative expression. You can easily make a travel journal on your computer and customize it for each child. A good travel journal should contain at least an inner pocket for storing cards, receipts and other mementoes.

Other useful features include pages for personalized travel scheduling, a name and address section for people you meet, a calendar, travel-related web site addresses, international dialing codes, a world time-zone map and metric conversion tables.

Craft a journal for all ages

For young children who cannot write, a binder with notebook paper, crayons or markers, section dividers and plastic sleeves for paraphernalia gathered on the trip is all that’s needed to create an enticing journal. You could have them draw pictures of the day’s events or express their thoughts for you to write down each day, suggests Aruna Hall, a travel consultant who works for the Great Canadian Travel Company in Winnipeg.

Use your computer to spruce up pages with scattered words and phrases to inspire and prompt writing. For example, encourage kids to think of the best dessert they tasted or new sounds and smells they experienced.

Accessorize your journal pages

Personalized stickers and stamps that match the theme of the trip are other fun items that can be created on your computer. If you’re heading to the zoo, for example, use stickers of animals for that day’s activity.

Print “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” stickers to enable kids to rate places they visited. In addition, attaching a “dollars spent” section to the journal is an opportunity to learn some money sense, says Moosa. “They can track how much money they started their trip with, how much they spent and how much they have left.”

Don’t forget to pack paper glue and decorative scissors to create special edges for cutouts.

Print maps to illustrate journal entries

Print off a map and place it on the front cover and inside flaps, chart the flight path for your family adventure, or mark all the provinces or countries you’ll fly over. For driving trips, your child could highlight the highways and streets you took to get to your destination.

If your child has to travel during the school term, the journal will be a prized item at the next show and tell, says Moosa. Her nephew handed in his travel journal to make up for the school days he missed.

Search for fun trip facts

Help your kids search the web for interesting information about their vacation, or encourage them to collect free promotional brochures and maps at the attractions they visit. They can cut and paste images from these into their journals.

“I always carry tape with me,” says Buchan. “I paste anything and everything on the pages of my journal. I keep restaurant cards, pieces of maps, torn out pages from guide books with info on a certain place I visited, leaves, blades of grass from hills I’ve climbed, or flowers that then dry on the pages of my journal.”

Buchan also asks people she befriends to write anecdotes, advice or inside jokes in her journal. And she never forgets to date each entry.

Capture exciting moments with cameras

Consider giving teens instant cameras, such as a Polaroid i-Zone or JoyCam, to keep their journals updated and save the extra step of sorting through unidentifiable pictures once they’re home. Or, if your family has gone digital, you can create a photo montage that can be burned onto CD and kept in the journal, as well.

Says Hall: “It’s nice to have a camera that dates your pictures so you know when and where the photographs were taken.”