by I started “blogging” our trips when we travelled to Thailand back in 2011 (our first trip with Caitlin to somewhere other than Disneyland and our first “big” trip since Marie and I had been to Mexico for a month before Caitlin was born). Blogging our trips turned out to be a great decision for a number of reasons:
- It provides a fantastic record of our trip… For our previous trips (and even some of our more recent, longer trips) Marie would do up one of those fabulous travel scrapbooks with pictures, receipts, tickets, balloon comments, etc. Scrapbooks make truly awesome memories and they are fun to look back on from time to time… and they’re something you can pass on to your kids, etc. but Marie’s about 5 trips behind now (they take a really long time to do) and there’s only so much information you can include in a scrapbook so lots of stuff inevitably gets left out… Blogging platforms are so powerful these days that you can easily include photos, video clips, etc. along with the written posts so much less gets lost or left out… And with the ability to export .pdf files of posts you can make electronic copies or print them out to include in those awesome scrapbooks!
- I think we pay more attention to things while we’re traveling because of the blog. We see people doing things or overhear conversations or notice funny signs and tell each other “that’s gotta go in the blog.” In new cities and places – especially ones where things are much different than we’re used to, it’s easy for everything to start to blur together and for the little details – the funny anecdotes, the cute little kid, the traffic cop with an annoying whistle, to sort of fade into the background and be forgotten. Marie and Caitlin read every post I put up (sometimes before I post it but always after) and they remind me of things I’ve forgotten to include…. On our longer trips Marie and Caitlin keep lists of things that didn’t make it into a particular post so I’ll remember to add them later… or sometimes we’ll include a post of just funny stuff that’s happened or they’ll do posts about their side of events, etc… It sounds like a lot of work and like it would make traveling a chore but it’s actually made our travel much more mindful. We pay attention to exchange rates and travel times and locations of things and silly things that we or our fellow tourists do so that we can include them in the blog.
- Writing the posts forces me to slow down and to spend time sitting and reflecting on what we’ve done, how things are going, etc. It takes me about 1.5 hours to look through the pictures from the previous day(s), to write the posts and publish them. I almost always do all of that in the couple of hours between when I wake up and when Caitlin and Marie wake up and get ready (sometimes I’ll work on posts on planes or trains or buses but it’s usually in the early mornings)… Being up and about early, I’m often the first person in the cafe or the only person in the square or the only person on the beach so I can always get a seat by a window or the table on the best corner… Servers are friendlier as they haven’t been dealing with tourists all day… The coffee is fresh… And while writing, I get to watch the place come to life as people – especially the locals – start going about their days. If we’re in the same place for a few days, I usually go to the same place (especially if they have good wifi) and sometimes get to know the people who work there…
- It forces me to go through my pictures regularly. I take a lot of pictures… I mean a lot of pictures… usually a couple of hundred a day or more and sometimes I get so caught up taking pictures I realize I didn’t really see the place we’d been visiting. I’m doing better about remembering to put the camera aside and to experience rather than record places but I genuinely like taking pictures and sometimes I forget to just enjoy the experiences… Looking for a couple of key pictures for each blog post (it’s pretty rare to find wifi fast enough to allow for posting more than 12-18 pictures in a post) from the hundreds I took forces me to look for the good ones… the ones with the best lighting or ones that best capture particular moments… I concentrate more on my picture taking and I take time to look back at what I experienced the day before – what’s not to love about doing that each day while you’re traveling…
- It’s a great way for family and friends back home to follow along. I am genuinely touched by the number of people in our lives who read about our travels and look forward to reading the posts… Co-workers, current and former students, Facebook friends, cousins, Caitlin’s teachers – people we see regularly and others we haven’t seen in person in years – comment on posts and forward them to their family and friends… So many times over the past few years we’ve struck up a conversation with someone we haven’t seen for a while and mentioned that we’d recently travelled to Turkey or some other place and they’ll be like “oh yeah, I remember that trip… I read your blog…”
- It gives back to the travel blogging community – I’ve learned a lot about places we travel to by reading other peoples’ blogs – so writing my own and making it public sort of pays that forward. I’m genuinely surprised by how many strangers read and comment on posts…
