Whether you take a family vacation once a year, or you love to travel multiple times a year, there are many ways you can create everlasting travel memories to commemorate the places that you’ve explored.
This will spark joy in you as you look back on the memories and have you thinking about the adventures that you plan to embark on next.
Here are the 9 fun ways to create everlasting travel memories, long after you return from your trip.
Keep a Travel Journal
Speaking of a travel journal, this is a great option to create everlasting travel memories.
While you are on your trip, you can write journal entries about how your day went and how you felt during your new travel experiences.
Throughout the trip, you can add anything reminiscent of your trip directly into your journal from the places that you visited as a business card, travel brochure, stamp, or whatever else you want to include.
This journal can also come in handy later on for you, or other fellow travelers. The people creating guides at The Trajet know that people like to see first-hand experiences as well as tips about their destination so they’d know what to expect. For example, visit the local restaurants, attractions, and shops during your stay.
Create a Travel Photo Book
Just looking at a picture will instantly help you to recall what happened before, during, and after that picture.
You can scrapbook your travel photo book. Print photos from your trip and customize the scrapbook pages with fun stickers, photo borders, drawings, monogram letter stickers, and so much more.
The possibilities of customizing your travel book are endless.
For example, if you and your family took a trip to the beach, you can use wooden popsicle sticks as photo borders and decorate the pages with beach-themed stickers.
If you do not have the time or the creative desire to make your travel photo book, you can send your photos to a third-party service like Shutterfly to have them make a photo book for you.
Purchase a Travel Map
Even though the GPS built into your smartphone is convenient, you can still purchase traditional maps to hang in your office or on a wall in your home.
Hang your map and mark out the destinations that you’ve visited with different colored thumbtacks.
Besides marking where you have been, you can also affix postcards or another small souvenir that can fit on your map for decoration purposes.
If paper maps and thumbtacks aren’t your thing, we also recommend checking out the increasingly popular scratch off travel maps.
Create Custom Postcards
Once you print your photos or go through your phone to find the best ones taken, you can choose one or more to make into custom postcards.
Keep one postcard to put in your fridge and/or put it into a travel journal or scrapbook. You can go the extra mile and send postcards to family and friends for the holidays, too.
Adobe has some free travel postcard templates for you to get started with.
Create a Digital Photo Album on Social Media
According to Datareportal, about 58.4% of the worldwide population has a social media account. You can turn your social media account into your digital photo album.
If you want to keep your travel photos private, there is a way to do that on your social media account.
When you share a photo on Facebook, you can share the photo as “Only me” which means it will only show up on your timeline.
Now you can start building your digital photo album by creating a new album, naming it whatever you want, and transferring your travel photos there.
If you want to share your photos with friends and family, you can make the photo post as “only friends” or you can make it public.
Save Your Leftover Currency
Whether you traveled to Mexico and have leftover pesos or embarked on a trip to Europe and have leftover euros, consider keeping your leftover money in a special box.
If your kids, friends, or family don’t believe that you visited a specific destination, just pull out the box, show them the leftover currency, from your trip and let them be amazed.
Buy Souvenirs
Souvenirs, especially those with the city and state or name of the country where you visited, are delightful to look at while you are relaxing at home.
You can display your souvenirs on a floating shelf in your living room or bedroom, on top of your bedroom dresser, or have an entire cabinet dedicated to your souvenirs.
Of course, what you would need to display your souvenirs would depend on how much you travel and purchase a souvenir as a keepsake.
You can also create a collection of souvenirs by picking up something related to where you visited to match the collection of souvenirs you already have.
For example, many rest stops have a souvenir penny machine. When you visit one of these rest stops, be sure to get your souvenir penny from the machine.
You may want to collect quarters or stamps from the states that you visited and keep them on your travel map or store them on your souvenir shelf.
Create a Travel Video or Slideshow
Combine your favorite song (or a song that fits the theme of one or more of your trips) with the video footage and/or photos you took from your travels.
Use video editing software on your computer to create a music video or slideshow of your own to capture the highlights of a recent trip.
Simply import your photos and videos, trim the clips and put them in the order that you want, add the music you want, and customize the video effects, transitions, and more.
Learn how to add pictures to a video using the video editing software of your choice (Movavi, iMovie or Windows Movie Maker).
Once you finish editing your video or slideshow, you have the option to save it to your computer, Google Drive, and/or external hard drive. Be sure to back up your video to two or more places in order to avoid a situation where you lose your device or data loss.
If you are not tech-savvy when it comes to using video-editing software, you can have someone in your inner circle do it for you or hire a freelancer with experience to give you a hand.