Holidays are fun but how do you make the fun unforgettable? When you’ve spent weeks or even months planning a two-week trip and it finally arrives, the excitement is immeasurable. You’re making wonderful memories on this trip but how do you keep them alive? How do you preserve them so that when you go back to your ‘normal’ life, you have something you can call up when you want to re-live those good times? There are different ways to record your holiday or trip. Here are a few of them:
- Blog
This is a no-brainer coming from me, right? 🙂 Whenever I go on a trip, half the time, I’m looking around and wondering what would be interesting to readers of my blog. Many people who go on round-the-world trips or who travel for extended periods of time like a year or more often set up blogs to let their friends and family back home know where they are and what they are up to. If you’re only going away for a long weekend or a week, setting up a blog might seem like a waste of time but I don’t think so. First of all, a blog can be set up just as quickly as setting up an email address so that really shouldn’t be an excuse. Secondly, if the word ‘blog’ makes you think of long, wordy articles that you know you’ll never get round to writing, I’m about to smash that excuse too. Say ‘hello’ to Tumblr. Tumblr is a blogging platform that is more popular with people who prefer posting photos to posting articles. Finally, although you may think there’s no point in setting up a blog just to put up a few posts about your short vacation, the truth is you just never know. Once you start putting up blog posts, you may get addicted to the whole blogging thing and refuse to give it up.
- Journal
As far as I am concerned, everyone should take a journal with them on holiday. A journal isn’t a special kind of book. It can be a notebook of any sort. It can even be a document on your laptop but I’m not keen on the document on a laptop thing because it takes away the spontaneity of writing and when you think about having to lug around a laptop, switching it on and making sure you have enough battery power, you may lose interest in actually typing anything in your electronic journal. Although you can use any notebook as a journal, I suggest using a notebook that is small enough to carry around. Choose a notebook with a beautiful cover – one that makes you happy every time you look at it as that way, you’re more likely to use it. Don’t worry about writing beautiful prose in your journal. Use it for both note-taking and writing beautiful prose. Say, you’re sitting in a café and something about the couple next to you strikes you as worth-remembering, just whip out your journal and write it down. See a convertible parked somewhere? Take out your journal and sketch it. When you get back to your room in the evening, you can sit down and write a well-composed piece about everything you saw and did that day.
- Take pictures
It’s taken as a matter of course today that you’ll take pictures when you’re on holiday. These days, you can even take pictures and upload them directly onto your Facebook page or anywhere else online. Although there are a lot of phones with great cameras, it’s always a good idea to take a camera with you. Somehow with a proper camera, you’re more likely to think about the pictures you take and compose photographs thoughtfully as opposed to when you’re holding a phone and you just point and click. It may seem like a lot of trouble but I suggest that you download pictures taken during the day onto your laptop when you get back to your room in the evening. When you’re doing so, rename a few of the pictures so you remember where exactly they were taken. If you take a vacation somewhere with lots of beaches like Cape Town after a while, one beach begins to look like another and you may not be able to place the pictures.
I know that there are many people who can’t be bothered to journal and who think that when it comes to photographs, that’s what camera phones are for but I still fee I really feel that everyone should jot down something when on holiday even if it’s the briefest of notes. Whatever medium you choose, what matters most is that you have a place you can go to see things that will bring the memories of those marvellous moments alive.
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Photograph by D. Sharon Pruitt
