I Kept a Travel Journal for 5 Months. Here’s What I Learned & Why You Should Try It.

Article Summary: 

• I journaled every day for five months while living in Florence, Italy. 
• This exercise allowed me to capture my version of the city — daily happenings, relationships, and special experiences between the touristy highlights. 
• I encourage others to document their travels while abroad because it captures a place as it meant to you, and who you were in that moment of time.  

I’ve been journaling since I was old enough to grasp a pen and realize my uneven scribbles could make meaning if I wanted them to. I’ve chronicled everything from childhood vacations to teenage experiences abroad. 

I still journal to this day. But one journaling experience stands apart from the rest: keeping a travel journal every day for five months while I lived abroad in Florence, Italy in college.

This isn’t a piece about the value of travel when you’re young. That’s a story for another day. This is about how a simple choice I made to capture a chapter in my life changed how I travel as an adult, and why I think you should start travel journaling, too. 

Travel journaling is this basic thing. You put pen to paper and document your travels as you see fit. You can jot down memories and details about where you are or where you’re going. Get into the nitty gritty of how all this moving and milling about makes you feel. 

I did all of this and more within the three notebooks I filled up while living in Florence. It began on my plane ride there, and ended on my plane ride home. 

From the front cover of one notebook to the end cover of another, I chronicled daily happenings, relationships, and cultural experiences. I saved mementos like train tickets and dried flowers and pamphlet photos. I captured traveling snapshots of my life as a 20-year-old.

I wrote constantly and messily and without a filter. I journaled in a way that to this day, I don’t think I’ll be able to replicate. 

Because I wasn’t just documenting my daily happenings. I was capturing my experience continuously, from the very start to the very end, without breaks. My notebooks are a complete moment frozen in time. 

The city I chronicled is my version of Florence. The Duomo isn’t just the Duomo. But the place where my roommate and I took jumping photos at 2 am when no one was around. 

The grocery store in Santa Croce isn’t just a grocery store. It’s where I accidentally asked for (and embarrassingly purchased) a kilo of salami because I misspoke in Italian. The dim sum restaurant by the river is where I made a new tradition with new friends. I could go on. 

The point is that what makes travel journaling special and worth it is that: 

• It captures a destination not just for the highlights, but the in-betweens. 
• It gives you something real and tangible and intimate to read back and experience years later. 
• Keeping a travel journal is a way to step back into another version of yourself. 

This travel journaling experience permanently changed how I travel today. I don’t focus on capturing the most important monuments or attractions when I write. I rely on my memory and camera for those things. 

I use my travel journals to collect the messy, hilarious, heartwarming, challenging, and real moments, in my own words. It’s like thinking about a memory versus describing it to someone else. Both are valuable and true, but they’re different. 

My experience journaling in Florence taught me how to capture my travels in an authentic way.

So this is why I encourage you to pick up pen and paper on your next trip. Try putting your travel thoughts and feelings to the page. I promise how you write about your travels while you’re experiencing it will capture something you’d otherwise forget. If you’re even remotely interested, I promise you won’t regret it. 

Travel, just like our memories, is a transient thing. What we think and feel in one important moment can change with time. 

By capturing your travels as you experience them, you cement a past part of you in a real way. And you cement a snapshot of a place, as it meant to you. So years down the line, even if your memories blur, the travel experiences you had, won’t. 

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Thanks for reading! If you’re looking for more literature and travel inspo, check out Rachel’s article on the coolest travel bookstore: Leopold’s in Madison, WI.