(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)
I recently spent an evening looking back at my blog posts from my self-guided music tour of England in November of 2014. As I read the posts, two related thoughts came to mind. The first one: What a cool trip! The second one: I’m so glad I wrote it all down!
That, in a nutshell, is how to make travel last forever. It goes without saying that you should enjoy your travels and do things that interest you. However, writing down my thoughts as I went along helped me to later relive those moments with more than just a vague feeling of “that was fun”.
It’s easy to take lots of pictures; in fact, I have more pictures (prints and electronic) than I know what to do with. Taking that little bit of extra time to record your impressions while they are still fresh in your mind will give the photos context and will make the memories yours alone…rather than just another snapshot that you could find in a million places on the Internet.
In 2014, I did most of my writing during travel “down times”: on bus and train rides, in airports, in restaurants (I was mostly traveling solo and it made waiting for food a lot easier), and when attractions were closed. On busy days, it was often in the form of point-form notes. If I at least wrote down a few key words, it would be a lot easier to fill in the gaps later when I had more time.
Of course, you don’t need to record your thoughts in the form of a blog. I kept written journals during many of my pre-2014 trips and then used the journals to prepare captions after I made prints of my photos and put them into photo albums. I also kept a journal during my 2014 travels, although not on every trip. I was busier on the group tours and I simply didn’t have the time to both blog and write a journal.
If you don’t keep a contemporaneous record, you end up facing the situation I have with our 2009 drive home from Nova Scotia through the Northeastern United States: there are lots of interesting pictures from places we’d never seen before (and may never see again), but the passage of time has dimmed their significance and some of them can no longer be associated with a particular place. I know the photo at the top of this post is somewhere in northeastern Vermont…but that’s all.
All of the pictures in today’s post are from that trip. I wish I could prepare a meaningful narrative about them but my specific recollections are very few. For example, I still remember that Bangor, Maine is Stephen King’s hometown and that Littleton, New Hampshire is a very quaint place for an overnight stopover. We stayed in a positively ancient hotel there and visited what had to be one of the world’s largest candy stores. I also suspect that there were not a whole lot of specific sights in east-central Maine…but maybe that’s just because we did a lot of driving that day and accordingly we had stopped “seeing”? It would be a lot easier to say, if I had kept a journal.
Stay tuned for more flashbacks from unique northern destinations!