From students embarking on a gap year to recently retired couples looking to enjoy their newfound freedom, people of all ages find themselves taking a year out of normal life to enjoy a year seeing the world. If you are lucky enough to spend a year ticking off your travel-shaped bucket list, you’ll certainly want to document all the places you visit. This will ensure your memories live on long after your travels have finished, allowing you and your loved ones to reminisce on the wonderful places you visited and the experiences you were lucky enough to sample. In this article, we look at 5 of the most popular ways to document a year abroad.
Blogging
Perhaps one of the most traditional ways to document life experiences is to simply write them down. If you are about to embark on a travelling adventure, pen and paper are essential travel items so you can keep a journal of everything you get up to. Not only is this great to look back on, but it’s also super easy to manage as all you need is a rucksack to carry around your pen and paper pad, allowing you to whip out your tools whenever something interesting happens. Obviously the more modern way to blog is to go digital, typing your stories into a word document. If you’re a creative writer, you may be able to put an interesting spin on your blogs, documenting your experiences in story form. Alternatively, recording your daily experiences in diary form works just as well.
Read: 4 Essential Items for An Interrailing Adventure
Vlogging
Even more modern than blogging on a laptop or tablet is taking it one step further and turning your travel experiences into vlogs. Vlogging has become a multi-million dollar industry, and for many individuals, travel vlogging has become a full-time career. Whether you try to build up an audience through your vlogs is up to you, but aside from this, it’s a great way to relive any crazy experiences you have while on a multi destination adventure. From shows to sunsets, vlogging goes one better than blogging, leaving you with the ability to rewatch all your favourite moments from a year abroad.
Sketching
If you’re a talented artist, the best way to document a year travelling is to pack a sketching pad along with your pencils. Every world famous monument you visit or every stunning view you come across, why not sketch what you see? This offers a truly unique way to capture the places you visit and the things you see. Obviously, this doesn’t work for everyone, and you do need a certain level of skill to be able to sketch out the sights you see while travelling. Going back to digital, we know that tech has changed the travel industry but this applies to sketching too. Many people are now sketching on tablets and laptops with digital pencils, which is easier. If you’re not a sketcher by trade, it may be worth getting to grips with digital sketching before you go travelling.
Scrapbooking
While the options above are great for capturing views and experiences, there’s so much more to travelling. Many of the memories you create will come in the form of items and collectables. Tickets, wristbands, coins and so on are great to hold on to, and will instantly bring memories flooding back. But these types of things often end up discarded or lost. To make sure this doesn’t happen, a great way to document your travels is to create a travel scrapbook. This way, you can store everything, including photos, items and personal anecdotes.
If you want a variety of memories, scrapbooking is definitely the best option. It’s also pretty easy; you don’t need any prior skills to put together a scrapbook of memories. This also allows you to enjoy your travels in the moment, rather than stopping to blog, vlog or sketch. Simply make sure you collect anything of interest and take plenty of photos. You can worry about the scrapbooking once home!
Photographing
Let’s face it, who doesn’t take photos when on holiday? Given that this is something you’d be doing anyway, it might be the most convenient way to document your travels. If you have a passion for photography, it’s definitely worth investing in a high end camera to get those pixel perfect shots of Mother Nature. If you don’t have any experience in photography, that’s fine too.
Most smartphones are equipped with quality cameras that are capable of capturing professional-looking shots. But don’t just snap a few images and leave it at that. Turn your favourite images into canvas prints or add them to a photo book. Websites like Snapfish allow you to create photo books online, which means all you have to do is upload your images and arrange them in an order you like!
