A road trip can be a fun and rewarding experience that opens you up to different discoveries and wonderful memories throughout a continuous journey through your map. Whether you do it solo or go on the road with some pals, there’s no other experience quite like it. Along with the stressful yet fun times figuring out the best places to park for the night and having to find bathrooms to bathe and change in, you get to go to various places and try out new things with relatively little expense.
Here are some fun ways to store your memories with each big stop without overloading your car:
Bring a piece of the food culture with you as you go.
If there’s one thing that’s always fun to explore in every city, country, or region, it’s the food. There are little differences, specialties, and distinctive flavors that define each area. Sometimes it’s a special dish or taste that you can’t get anywhere, and it stays in your mind for years after. Why not get something special to relive those treats with every stop? Imagine buying some special coffee grounds or grabbing a bottle of Filipino coconut vinegar to give you that zing for every meal after, even as you move through the different islands of Luzon.
Send postcards back home.
A fun way to document the trip without having to lug anything around is also to send yourself a postcard from each stop you go to. It gives you a fun way to recollect how the trip has been so far and send out a unique card representative of each region. By the time you get back home, you’ll have this great set of memories to greet you.
Snap a Polaroid with each stop
Another way to keep your memories in easy-to-carry and fun mementos is by going the route of Polaroid photography. You can take a pic of a particular attraction or monument to remember each place. Or take a snap of yourself in every area, and see how you’ve changed with each time. It’s a nice little collection that won’t take up much space, and you can always put it all together in one scrapbook if you want to organize it later on.
Make a travel journal.
There’s something novel about making a trip log, but it’s a great way to relive every piece of the trip from the annals of your mind and get to tell little stories and anecdotes while they are still fresh in your mind. It’s an excellent way to close out each day, and when it’s complete, it’s a perfect encapsulation of your trip that you can reminisce on. Research even suggests that we distinctly remember things better when we write them down.
Create a knickknack box
If you like collecting small items or oddities, you can bring along a small box or even a jar for knickknacks from each place. If it’s legal, you can also take a small stone or some ground from each location and eventually turn it into a tiny terrarium of sorts full of actual pieces of your trip.
It’s up to you which of these things appeal most to your road trip style, or you can even mix them up and make the most of your memories on the open road.
