Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking: the perfect way to make a trip a lasting memory

What makes traveling a lovely experience are the memories you create along the way. When you visit other places, other countries that are far away from the one you call home, you are there not just to see the sights, but hopefully to learn other cultures and meet other people. Traveling expands your horizons and the things you see, hear, smell, taste, feel and do all make for beautiful memories that are worth remembering and retelling to your loved ones back home.

But how can you preserve the memories of your journey once the journey is over and you are back in the confines of your own home? Would it not be nice to take something more solid with you that will certainly refresh your mind of every detail of the trip whenever you look at it?

Some people preserve the memories of their travels by scrapbooking – creating a travel scrapbook. Before, this is done by bringing bulky cameras and rolls of film. This is very tricky, however, because a number of factors can ruin your pictures for you. If the lighting is not good, your pictures will not come out too good. The camera you would have to bring would also have to be waterproof, or else rain or seawater will damage it. You can also run out of film, or worse, have your film exposed to light before you get to have it developed. Photo prints themselves can be damaged by water and other elements.

Thanks to technology, this no longer has to be the case. With even cheap digital cameras, you can take as many pictures as you want, transfer the file to your computer and do a little photo editing. Once you are done, you can upload your photos to a website dedicated to image hosting. You can share this digital scrapbook of yours to your friends and family back home with a simple email containing the web address of your scrapbook.

But it does not have to stop there. Photographs are not the only things that you can include in your travel scrapbook. There are so many things you can put in your scrapbook to remind you of your experiences during your travels. Aside from prints of the photographs you have taken, here are just a few items that you can possibly include in your scrapbook:

• Postcards, stamps and currencies of the country you have visited
• The complimentary stationery of the hotel you have stayed in
• Menus of the nice restaurants you went to and the coasters or umbrellas of the drinks you had
• Stickers, labels and tags
• Stubs of your airline ticket or train ticket, or even the admission ticket to a concert you went to see
• Business cards and invitations you might have received
• Dried flowers
• Maps and the itineraries you have used
• Poems and sketches reminding you of the country you have visited

A journey to another country is always a marvelous experience. You should keep these memories of your travels fresh long after it is done.