Travel Journals – Creating Family Vacation Memories

Are your family travels a time of togetherness, discovery, and fun? Or, do your children play with electronic gadgets and plug in their headphones? Does their cell phone look like part of their hand because they text so much?

You can easily turn this around by using a family travel journal. It opens the door to connecting family members and creating lifetime memories.

Try this for an approach: tell your kids that everyone will have their own section in the travel journal. Are you shuddering just thinking about their reaction? Will your kids groan?

Because children do that sometimes, your kids may resist at first. In order to make this work, try some of these tricks:

• Invest in a blank travel journal that has multiple sections. One that has tabs is ideal, but in a pinch, you can create your own sections using divider tabs.

• Stock up with colored pens, pencils, crayons, glue sticks, scissors, etc. for your budding writers. Younger children will love using stickers.

• Give each person, you included, a durable pouch or container to hold souvenirs which might be put in the travel journal. brochures, Ticket stubs, stamps, menus, postcards, are perfect mementos.

• Ask young kids if they need some help. If they say no, leave them alone. If yes, ask if they prefer help from an older sibling, assuming an older child is willing, or an adult. Older siblings helping younger brothers and sisters is in itself a memory worth capturing.

•In their own designated section, each can put whatever they want. Don't correct or censor anyone's journal entries.

Boost their interest with fun assignments. Some ideas follow:

• At a museum, start with the gift shop and have children pick out their favorite postcard. Then, while touring the museum, have them look for that art or object. Later, glue that postcard in their section of the travel journal, adding words about it.

• Daily, suggest your children look for a trip highlight to draw. Suggest buildings, animals, mountains, seashells or people --- anything is fair game.

• Propose trying new foods and record what they ate. Giving thumbs up or thumbs down to various restaurants dubs them as “Mystery Food Critics”.

• Don’t miss the opportunity to deepen your family legacy. Have children write down things they think are funny or memorable when visiting relatives.

• On long trips in a car, engage them in looking for interesting bumper stickers, vanity plates or signs. Include these in the travel journal. Later photos of these license plates, road signs, or unusual cars can be added.

• New words or phrases in a foreign country, help kids remember the trip.. Ask them to find words for bathroom, dog, or hello to write them in the travel journal.

• Particularly for foreign travel, stop in a local post office,. Kids love choosing stamps. They are inexpensive, colorful souvenirs to scrapbook in your family trip diary. Practicing their foreign language skills at the same time will be educational, yet fun.

You can choose, as a family, how you want to share putting words and mementos into the journal. This could be one that you do at meal times, or an evening activity. Teens may want to write their journal entries at night, so be prepared to turn the travel journal over to them. Early risers can add their memories in the morning.

If despite your best efforts to involve your children in this activity, don't force it on them. Try to engage them in other ways instead.

When you have everyone's attention, ask the “non-participants” what some of their day's special times were. Write those in your travel journal. (Don't be surprised if they notice parts of your trip that you did not notice.)

A travel journal turns your ordinary vacation into a family legacy. Long after your trip is over, your trip journal will still be here, forever reminding each member of your family the fun time they had as a family.