You came back with four hundred photographs and you’ve shown people six. The rest are on the phone, sorted by date, and the next time anybody opens them it’ll be by accident.
A trip is the easiest thing in the world to over-document and one of the hardest to keep, which is odd, since it’s also the part of life best suited to being recorded properly.
A trip comes with a shape already
Most diary keeping fights a structural problem: ordinary life has no beginning or end, so there’s nothing obvious to organise a record around. A trip hands you that for free. It starts, it runs for a known number of days, it finishes, and every day is dense with things that don’t normally happen.
Which is why a travel journal is the one form of journaling that people who never journal will attempt. The material presents itself and the container is obvious: eleven days, eleven entries, done.
It’s also a good way to find out whether a daily record suits you at all, without committing to a year. Manage it for eleven days and you’ve learned something useful for very little.
What’s gone within a year
Ask somebody about a trip they took two years ago and you get the headline: the city, the weather, one restaurant, whether it was good.
What’s disappeared by then is the texture. The name of the place with the terrible coffee. What things cost. The pension owner’s dog. The running joke about the road signs. The argument on day four and how it got sorted out. The exact way you got lost.
None of that is a view, so none of it is in the photographs. It’s a sequence, or a line of dialogue, or a number, and those need words or panels to survive.
Do it that evening, not when you get home
Fifteen minutes at the bar or on the bed with the fan going. Three or four panels, or three or four lines if you’d rather not draw.
Doing it on the trip matters more here than it does in ordinary life, because trips compress in memory unusually fast. By day nine, day two has already merged into day three, and by the time you’re home the whole thing has become one impression with a couple of peaks in it. Write it the following week and you’re inventing.
Record the dull logistics alongside the good bits: the delayed train, the price of the taxi, what was for breakfast. Those turn out to be the entries that put you back there.
The disasters are the material
The strongest trip strips are about things going wrong, for a structural reason: a disaster has a turn in it and a good view doesn’t.
The hire car desk at midnight. The room that bore no relation to the photographs. The lunch that arrived as an entire fish, head included. The moment the map stopped making sense. Nothing you’d have chosen at the time, and all of it is the first thing you’ll tell anybody about the trip. Take that as the signal about what’s worth recording.
Catch whatever you said to each other on the last night about how it had gone, too. That one ages well.
Where photographs win
The view, obviously. Also faces, also food. Take them. A drawing of a mountain is a worse mountain by every measure available.
The split runs roughly like this: photograph what you’re looking at, write or draw what happened. Most people do the first thoroughly and the second not at all. That’s how four hundred pictures add up to a trip you can’t quite remember.
The object at the end
Eleven strips is a small book. Print it, cheaply, and it lives on a shelf where four hundred phone photographs never will.
That’s the real argument for any of this: an eleven-page thing that exists beats a perfect archive that stays on a device. Stripkin is one route to it, where you talk for a couple of minutes at the end of each day and the strips come back with the same people in them throughout. A pen and the hotel notepad gets you there too, and neither works unless you do it before you fall asleep.