Write About Your Travels

 

Me and a Rottweiler friend in Germany

Today's picture is one of me taken in southern Germany several years ago. Don't we all enjoy taking photos when we travel? Maybe put them in an album when we return home. Show them to our family and friends. And we keep them to refresh our memories when time has gone by. That's great, but...

You can capture all that happened during your travels by writing about the places you went, the people you met, the architecture, the markets, the food, your impressions and so much more. 

When we travel, I take a journal with me and make the effort to write something in it each evening. I can write more than what a mere photo shows, but the two together will be a lasting record of the trip. 

I often enlarge on a part of the trip as a travel essay. My journals are for me, but the travel essays are ones I hope to share with others. There are places to get published with this kind of an essay. The publications that accept this kind of writing want more than a mere report of where you went and what you saw, There has to be some meaning or feeling or something in how you were affected by what you saw. 

We've stayed in many hotels over the years, but one hotel outside of Munich left a real impression on me. So much so, that I wrote about it and the piece  was published on a travel website. I wrote another about visiting my husband's grandfather's hometown near the Black Forest. The facts are in it, but also the emotions that surfaced as we thought about him as a young man in this small industrial town. 

Visiting a WWII American cemetery in southern France left a lasting impression on me. A piece I wrote about that visit was published in a Memorial Day edition of a senior newspaper in Kansas City. We traveled from Nice to Paris on that trip, but I chose only the visit to the cemetery to write about.

I wrote another about food in pubs in the UK and Ireland. If you center on one phase instead of ALL the things you saw and did in California or Hawaii or Spain, you're more likely to find a publisher for your travel essay. 

Readers like to know about a foreign country, or an area of the USA, but they also enjoy the personal touch. Facts and figures are fine, but it's the personal and the emotion that will make the reader want to see that country or region on their own. Or let them be an armchair traveler. 

Don't wait until six months after you return home to write about your trip. The sooner you do so, the better. The details will be fresh in your mind. Much later, you might struggle to remember or decipher what's in your travel journal.