Recording your Travel memories

If you travel a lot like us, you’ll want to record your memories, and maybe not just for you but the next generations of your family to view and understand you more as they reach your age and more naturally empathise with your experiences.

I was looking at some images recently from a childhood holiday with my family, and I confess to feeling a warm nostalgic emotion for the time and the people in the picture. It was a mix of the joys of childhood and something else, remembrance of the feeling of protection that only being in the presence of parents brought. I have lost my parents, and I confess that the world has become a little smaller without them; it’s like a top cover or overwatch has been removed. I’m used to it, of course, but delving back into the memories of the past I find both nostalgic and rewarding.

Of course, back in the day, there wasn’t the multimedia options of today; it was wet film and a dash to the chemist to pick up the pictures, and of course, a fight over who got to open them first. But Mum would always make us wait until after dinner. Everything in our house had to wait until after dinner and only if plates were clean. Mum remembered wartime rationing and going to bed hungry as a child, and was brought up with the phrase "waste not want not" forged on the tip of her tongue. What we didn’t eat, we got for breakfast on account of some other children in the world going hungry. No, I never understood the logic either, but I take heart in the fact that we never did want for anything really important.

Of course, after technology advanced along came the video recorder, large in format to start with but soon compact, digital cameras were next, different sorts of data cards came and went over time, each of us had drawers full of tapes, cassettes, and data cards, and nothing to play them on as the obsolete players were non-replaceable; the new ranges of products unable to play the older media.

So if you want family members to look back on the trips either with or without them, perhaps we have to think creatively about how we treat our recorded memories. After all, the imprint you make can really mean something to others, as it did to me.

So let's look at our options.

The most obvious these days, of course, is still to take pictures. Everyone since the smartphone is a photographer now, right? Firing off pictures and selfies multiple times a day, but what do they do with the images? Sure, we drop some of them onto social media, for others who are not necessarily close to scroll over, only for them to be lost as the images scroll down and down until they drop off the end. The matter is compounded if you run out of cloud space, and the images fall off the end as you add new images to your account. If you, like us, have more than a phone, a mirrorless camera, GoPro, (or other action cameras) , a drone maybe, and dash cams, of course, how many images will you take on a 90 day tour of Europe?

There are answers, of course. I travel with a portable hard drive and established workflow where I download images from all devices either daily or weekly and organise them into files with a naming protocol that makes sorting later easier, but do you want that? I’m a photographer and a bit of a geek when it comes to this sort of thing, but most people would rather watch paint dry, I suspect, so how do you avoid taking the endless amounts of photographs only to abandon them straight after the holiday to a social media feed or to the cloud?

Online photography viewing options are available where you can sort the images into relevance; I use Adobe Behance, but there are others. These galleries can also be marked for public or private access. https://www.behance.net/mscoth .

Another option is to create a photograph book , easy to do on line and they make great gifts.

Video, of course, is a little easier; you can upload to services such as YouTube and Vimeo, where you can make your collection private or public and view as you wish on demand. Many people do this, like us, but beware if you feel the need for strangers to watch and comment then you enter the game of Youtube where people don’t always play nicely.

Let's go retro for a minute, the written memory has its place surely. I am an avid Journal writer. I write in my journal for an hour a day, 45 minutes in the morning and 15 mins before retiring to bed. The former for me is usually about 5 am with an extra strong cup of coffee. A throwback to workdays where sleeping was optional, but this is where I start every day. It’s a great way to record memories, thoughts, aspirations, and objectives and helps recall facts when later I’m writing blogs or scripting videos. Some people take this further and write books both e-books and paper books; you are really only limited by your imagination. You can even address your journal writing to a person whom you might one day hope will read it, a child or a partner in the hope it brings them comfort. Memory retention is a challenge, of course, at times, but I date each page and bookmark really important entries. The number one rule of journaling, of course, is never write anything you wouldn’t want an adversary to read.

I hope our daughter and maybe even our grandchildren will read my journals, read about where I have been, how I have lived to better understand the world, how I have lived and loved , and how I saw things. We are all products of our time, and context is the key to understanding, and this medium will not expire due to the loss of a current player to view or listen. Unless it’s eaten by mice, of course.

I still occasionally enjoy purchasing a postcard or writing a letter, timely but strangely cathartic.

Here’s to more journaling, blogging, vlogging, picture-taking, postcard and letter writing recording of memories; may they never stop until we stop and then become the cherished possessions of our loved ones.

We hope you enjoyed our ramblings best wishes Helen and Martin