Everything is finally unpacked from that last adventure and you have just uploaded the pictures from your amazing trip onto the computer.  Friends are still asking about your journey and you can smell the spice or the air from the place/country you just left.  Now what?  What happens when people stop inquiring about your trip?  When they roll their eyes when you mention your last vacation to where-ever-it-was?  What will happen to those memories that you made when time comes in to slowly wash them away?

A journal can capture your personal feelings and reactions while you are traveling, but it also isn’t something you want to share with the world.  A scrapbook, on the other hand, is like a journal that you get to share.  Print off your favorite photos from that trip you just took (CVS makes decent copies relatively quickly and cheap), gather up those saved train tickets and receipts, and get a good pen ready to write out special memories.

A scrapbook could include fancy pens, crazy stickers or curious edge cutting scissors, or it can be a basic gathering of pictures from your adventures.  These books are great for sharing with friends and family, because they provide a story plot that computer generated slide shows miss out on.  Your ‘guests’ can also flip through representations of your favorite memories at their own leisurely pace, instead of viewing every meal, building, and bad hair-do your camera caught.

Scrapbooks are great because they help you remember little details that you might have forgotten, like that great restaurant where the waiter spilled sauce all over you or a particularly gorgeous bus ride with friends in between destinations.  One of my favorite scrapbooks includes letters that friends wrote to me my final year at Wellesley College; they are bits of love from the past that help me get through challenging times.  And the pictures always make me smile as I remember adventures shared.

Each of these books capture points in time of a history created by a journey, whether it be a time spent traveling abroad or senior year.  They provide their owners a more interactive way to share their memories, while providing a bookmark of time filled with learning and change.  And honestly, they are just fun to put together.