A Memory to Make Us Smile

 

My friend, Stephanie with Christen and me on our first cruise.

Yesterday’s podcast was about journaling our vacations, a topic I’ve mentioned multiple times on both the podcast and the blog. Loyal listeners and readers have no doubt figured out that this is a near and dear topic for me. All journaling is, really, but I am especially attentive to journaling the events of my travels, and it all took root with a trip that Christen mentioned in the podcast – my first cruise.

That cruise changed a lot of things for me. First and foremost, it birthed a life-long passion for cruising that soon after turned into a change in career. I loved that cruise so much that I couldn’t imagine it being my only one, and I was willing to do just about anything to do it again and again, so I became a travel advisor. And of course, it taught me the value of documenting my experience, which allowed me to include great detail in the scrapbook I made of that trip. It also allowed my traveling companions to do the same.

That first cruise journal wound up being some 19 pages long and almost 5500 words when typed. At one point, I had posted it on the internet on my MySpace account, which has long since been deleted, but it made me wonder if I should post it again…this time on my blog or maybe even on my travel agency website. Just thinking about it compelled me to hunt it down, searching multiple CDs and thumb drives for the original typed documents, just to confirm that it would be possible to post it somewhere if I decided I wanted to do that. And that made me want to read it, so I skimmed through a few pages before dropping the folder on my harddrive for later retrieval.

I love going back to reread my journals. I often read about things I had all but forgotten, and it always makes me smile to remember the fun I had. It encourages me to travel again, and to share my experiences with others as I do. This summer, I have several trips in the works, and I hope to find the time to journal each of them as well. It may not be in the great detail that I journaled that first cruise, but hopefully it will capture the spirit of the trip so that I can look again at it many years down the road and remember what great fun we had. And that’s what life is all about – living it to the fullest and making as many good memories as we can while we can. Hopefully we are preserving them in some way so we can relive them again and again – something wonderful and sweet to bring a smile to our faces and wash the hard parts of life away. We can all use a little bit of that.

For more info on journaling your travels or journaling in general, check out our Heard it on the Podcast where we’ve included links to previous podcasts and blogs on the topic.