experiences
Are Traditional Travel Scrapbooks a Thing of the Past?
As I was going through some old files this morning I came across my first (and only) travel scrapbook. An amateur but carefully assembled collection from my semester abroad in England –cropped photos, fading admission tickets, even a pressed daffodil.
A year or two later, Creative Memories became a big deal and I invested in an expensive book covered with travel themed tapestry, a $40 photo cropper and all kinds of clever layouts, stickers, and paraphernalia to make my memories beautiful. That scrapbook was never finished, barely even started.
Already I was starting to travel more, so the time that previously might have been spent documenting the trip of a lifetime was already being used to plan new ones.
A few years after that, online photo books like Shutterfly and Snapfish became all the rage. After about 15 hours of choosing photos and attempting to put together the perfect layouts, I gave up, only 5 pages in.
At that point my Facebook account already had the highlights of my trips in numerous albums available to my friends. If I wanted to relive the fun I could just scroll through those.
Then we started Heels First Travel, which in many ways is the perfect scrapbook, though I find I’m once again falling behind with some trips from over a year ago unrecorded.
And now there’s Instagram which in many ways might be the perfect scrapbook. Photographing food and signs and moments, in addition to scenery and people is a now thing. So in many ways we’re able to capture the point of an entire scrapbook in just a few shots, with cool filters built right in.
But there’s a certain charm of memories in print that I don’t think digital can ever replace. That crumpled concert ticket next to a photo of you and your bestie. The ticket stub from your first first class flight. The sketch a random stranger made of you on a cocktail napkin.
Probably why I still have several boxes of memories from my trips and an uncertain desire to once again start cropping and pasting. If I ever get the time.
What do you think? Are traditional scrapbooks obsolete? How do you like to capture your trip memories?
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