How to Keep Your Travel Memories Alive

Last Updated on September 11, 2024

So what happens after you’ve had an epic trip of a lifetime? How do you keep those memories alive and well? Thanks to this travel blog, I’ve been able to record my memories and look back at my previous trips.

But a travel blog isn’t the only way to preserve your travel memories. Keeping memory boxes, scrap-booking, and collecting souvenir are just a few of the fun ways to commemorate your adventure. Read on for 10 ways how to keep your memories from this trip alive and vivid in your mind.

Keeping Your Travel Memories Alive

Take Pictures and Videos

One of the best ways to keep your memories alive is by taking photos and videos. Not only will this help you remember what everything looked like, but it can also be a great way to show your friends and family your amazing trip. If you’ve got plenty of photos from a trip, consider making a video collage with music and share it on your social channels!

Send Postcards to Yourself

How many times have we seen postcards hanging on walls in people’s homes? Postcards are terrific ways to preserve travel memories, especially so if you’re sending one to yourself from a remote location like Antarctica or Svalbard! Wait and see who reaches home first — you or the postcard.

Write a Travel Journal

Writing a travel journal is a great way to keep all your memories in one place, and it’s also really fun to look back on years later. I’ve kept so many travel journals from the first few years of my travels that I’ve lost count. These days, a travel journal doesn’t have to be on paper — you can easily share trip reports with friends and family by email and social channels.

Create a Travel Blog

I started my blog in 2008 as a way of keeping my travel memories alive — and it has completely changed my life. I connected to so many people through this travel blog and I have carved a career out of this. Now I get paid to travel and I cannot be more thankful for it. Even if you have no interest in becoming a travel blogger, creating a travel blog can be such a fun way to record what happened on your trips and immortalize your travel memories!

Print Our Your Photos

One of my favorite ways to decorate our home is print out photos, put them in frames and hang them on the wall. This is an amazing way to keep travel memories fresh and share those with friends who visit — you can reminisce about your adventures anytime of the year! Walgreens and CVS all have printing services, but you can also easily order online to get them printed and delivered to you at home on Shutterfly.

Turn Your Photos into a Book or Canvas Print

You can also put together your travel photos into a hardcover photo book. The process takes only a few minutes: first choose a theme or design for your book, the size you want, and start uploading photos. Voila!

Canvas prints look amazing as home decor. I had an image of Kaleya on her first birthday printed into a poster and it looks gorgeous.

Create a Travel Scrapbook

Alternatively, it’s a good idea to create an album of everything that happened during this adventure. Buy a physical scrapbook or get an online one and write down what was happening in each picture so your friends can get the full story behind each photo.

Dig out all the ticket stubs you accumulated during the trip — they could be entry tickets, receipts or even boarding passes! Once you’ve got your ticket stubs, glue them into your scrapbook as well.

Get a Scratch Off Map

Another great way to keeping your travel memories alive is by scratching off all the destinations on a map that you visited. With every country you visit, scratch off the gold foil until it reveals the colorful background underneath.

It’s really satisfying to see countries and states disappearing one at a time! You can also get creative with this and use different colors to represent the different types of memories you made — like green for hikes, blue for swimming and so on. This scratch off map is a perfect framable size, at 24×36 inch, the largest scratch off map available on Amazon!

Collect Unique Souvenirs

It can be a lot of fun to go through your souvenirs and relive all the amazing moments from your trip. Instead of buying typical souvenirs like fridge magnets, and shot glasses, why not think outside the box and collect unconventional souvenirs like sand from the beach or snow from the ground? Otherwise, a handmade tribal mask or a carved wooden ornament would make great home decor items instead of a magnet.

Keep Leftover Money from Your Trip

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a fair amount of foreign currency from almost every country I’ve visited. I store and display them in an ‘adventure fund’ coin bank and keep the notes to display in an album.

Make a Memory Box

A memory box might be anything from a tiny keepsake to a large souvenir. You can display it or store it in a drawer! Within each box, you may place different memories from various trips or nations. Trinkets, tickets, unspent money, photographs – whatever you like! Add anecdotes or phrases you learned while on the trip to personalize it.

Get a Wanderchain and Collect Travel Tokens

Another great way to make those travel memories last is to get the Wanderchain from the Wander Club. Collect engraved travel tokens for every country, national park, state, and landmark that you have visited and add it to a handcrafted token holder. What’s also great about The Wander Club is that they provide a meal to a child in need for every order placed.

Paint Your Photos

Turn your photographs into works of art. Using anything from crayons to paint, you may create a masterpiece. Spend some time bringing your recollections to life with watercolors, colored pencils, or acrylic paints. You can even use software programs like Pencil Sketch and Sketch Me! that allow you to upload the image onto your iPad and start tracing/sketching it.

Puzzle Your Trip

If you’re not the artistic type, create a puzzle of your trip. Find a photo of the skyline, monument, or landscape from your destination and custom make a jigsaw puzzle with your own image. You can order a custom puzzle on Amazon with your own picture and get it delivered it to you within a few days. It’s definitely a special experience doing a puzzle out of your own image.

How Do You Keep Your Travel Memories Alive?

I hope you’ve found my ideas useful! With these ideas, I’m sure your travel memories will last a lifetime. If you have any more suggestions for keeping travel memories, please leave them below.

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