Tracking Your Travels

It’s really important, not only for your friends and family but, for you to track your travels.  With the continual creation of new social media tools and applications, there are so many ways to keep track of your travels, both personally and publicly. 

Some common ways to share your travels are through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, SnapChat, and others.  I personally only use Facebook and Instagram, and sometimes Pinterest.  I take a lot of photos and I love to upload them to share with my mom and friends as I travel.  I use a lot of my photos to inspire my paintings and I also love to print them out when I get home and put into photo albums and to hang on my wall or make collages with.

I love to keep a journal as I travel.  For my first backpacking trip which was to Western Europe, I used computers in all of my hostels or that I borrowed from a friend for a few hours to write in my blog on Blogspot.com.  I didn’t keep a handwritten journal until I went on my second trip which was to Central America.  I then began to transfer my journal to add to my blog but I then realized that what I was blogging was essentially my journal.  I also realized that when I try to find travel information, it’s kind of difficult to find exactly what I am looking for and in a timely fashion.  Therefore, I decided to stop that blog for now and to begin this new one to provide the important information needed for all travelers while also sharing my experiences.  I kept two notebooks.  One was my personal journal and the other was a notebook that I used to keep track of every bit of important information for each country including: currency, estimated budget spent there, entrance and exit fees, visa and passport information, food and shopping prices, where I stayed and cost, best means of transportation and its cost, and anything else that I felt is important to know.  Your journals are memory holders that you can keep forever and they are a great way to express yourself as you travel, especially when you are traveling alone.  I deal with really bad anxiety so writing in my journal helps me to cope with my anxiety as I travel.