I’ve been a travel journaler since I was in high school, right after my sister and I read Meg Cabot’s Every Boy’s Got One, which was an epistolary story told basically over Blackberry(!!) emails and the main character’s travel diary (which she got engraved at the airport?). We loved that book, so when we started to do our own traveling, it became tradition for me to bring along a specific notebook and write about our experiences.

Obviously it’s evolved a lot over the last seventeen (????) years, and it’s been a fun exercise of every night spending an hour or two writing about what happened that day, sketching food, buildings, a piece of ephemera or two.

And after bouncing around different notebooks for the last few years, I’m so happy I have access to Travelers Notebook inserts that I can use for each trip? It’s reminiscent of my very first travel diary, which was a thin, flimsy Cattleya insert that had just enough pages for a few days in Hong Kong. Honestly, I’ve loved the way TNs are part of travelling for me–setting up my inserts, filling them up, sometimes even choosing destinations based on which one has TN stamps! I did it for Madrid, Taiwan, Kuala Lumpur, and now Tokyo, where the Traveler’s Factory store is!

One of the things readers have said about my work is that I’m quite good at describing things–places and food, specifically, that seem to take them to different places. To be honest, that’s mostly because I learned to do that very early on via travel notebooks. Because I taught myself to write things down to remember, so I can share them with other people.

But the book that really taught me how to put those two together was Samantha Sotto’s Before Ever After, which takes place during a tour of Europe. It’s one of the books that really taught me that it was possible to write about places you’ve passed through, and make them real and tangible for someone reading.

Also! I’ll throw in this one last book recommendation, just because I so remember reading it and picturing myself in the place the author described. All’s Fair in Blog and War by Crissie Peria was fun, and makes me smile every time I think about Macau.

I’ve been trying not to make notebooks my entire personality, but really, I could talk about them all day. It’s one of the things that changed my writing (for the better, I hope), and something I still love to do!