It sounds strange but most of us no longer know how to store memories. With the ease that social media platforms provide in posting a play-by-play of our lives, there is little reason to spend time preserving our memories in other ways.
Still, we think any opportunity to romanticise our life is an opportunity worth the time. So we’re sharing some of our favourite ways to document and celebrate travel memories that’ll have you falling in love with your life all over again.
1. Make a travel photobook
An easy and quick way to store away travel memories is by making a photo book. Plenty of services make this a convenient option, such as Photobook and Canva. Simply choose the style of book you want, upload your photos, customise the pages to your liking, insert texts, stickers, and graphics, then hit ‘Order’, and they’ll do the rest of the work and deliver it to your doorstep.
Display it as a coffee table book you can pick up and look at occasionally, or dedicate a storage space in your home just for travel photo books.
2. Use a new fragrance on your trip
Scents are treasure troves of emotions and memories bottled up. Find a new scent just for the trip or use one that you already love. It doesn’t have to be expensive, a bottle of cologne will work just fine.
Since scents are so closely linked with our memories, associating a trip with a single scent can elicit an overflow of powerful thoughts and emotions you had while exploring a place.
Scentses & Co. is a great place to pick up travel-sized, refillable bottles of your favourite fragrances. And you can switch them up each month based on your subscription.
3. Bring a book on your trip
Here’s one of our favourite ways to document travel memories and it works especially well if you’re fond of reading on holiday and scrapbooking. You may want to trade the Kindle for a physical book for this. Pick a book to bring with you and turn it into a scrapbook. Slip in polaroids, ticket stubs, stamps, receipts, notes and thoughts about your day.
It can be as messy or as organised as you’d like it to be. This may not work for those who want to keep their books spotless, but if you like having books that look like they’ve been lived in and loved, don’t hesitate to spill parts of your story onto the pages. When you do reach for a book to reread, you’ll also find all these little mementoes of your holiday within it.
4. Curate a music playlist
We don’t know who first coined this thought, but the sentiment remains true, “Music is the closest thing we have to time travel”. It’s transportive, taking us back to a moment in time, reigniting the very feeling we had, good or bad, in a powerful way.
Make a playlist on Spotify or Apple Music and label it with the location and date of your trip. These little digital capsules serve as audio diaries of your time away. Listen back in a few weeks, months, or years and watch the memories come rushing back in.
5. Send a postcard to yourself
If Miley Cyrus said you can buy yourself flowers, you can certainly send yourself a postcard. It’s hardly a new idea as many travellers have a tradition of mailing themselves a postcard from wherever they are.
They make delightful collectables with short stories that serve as a reminder of your time away. Do it consistently, and over time, you’ll have an album or several albums full of thoughts written by your younger self to look back on.
6. Collect recipes in a travel notebook
Ah, the best people are those who love good food. Even better people are those who love making good food. Have you ever had a moment when eating a meal took you back to your Grandmother’s dining table or the flavours of a dish at a restaurant instantly reminded you of evening barbecues in your Dad’s garden?
Food is so much more than taste and nutrition—it’s the history, art, and caches of your life and the lives of those who were here long before you. So it makes sense that when you travel and enjoy local cuisine, you should ask how it’s made. We like to designate a notebook, physical or digital, in which we write down our favourite recipes discovered on our travels.
Date them and note the place where you had that meal. It’s a delightful way to hold on to memories you can then pass on to your children and grandchildren after.
7. Pick up a bottle of wine every time you travel
Take a cue from 1998’s, The Parent Trap film when Nick Parker tracks down a rare bottle of wine he and his ex-wife, Elizabeth James, drank at their wedding. It’s a subtle but romantic gesture in the film that reignites the love between the two protagonists.
In light of romanticising our lives, why not pick up a bottle of wine you drank from each trip you make and start a wine collection of your own? Open it on a special occasion in a year or several years after and find yourself transported back to the time and place when you first sipped on a glass of that vino.
8. Get started on an old-school hobby
If you’re a child of the 80s or 90s, you probably remember this classic hobby: stamp collecting. Perhaps not the coolest of hobbies, stamp collecting has its charms. Apart from resurrecting an old-school interest that is sure to impress some older folk, it is also an inexpensive way to collect and display memories.
Order a stamp book and start stashing away your collection from your travels. Over time, you will have built up a unique collection of stamps from all over the world.
