Today I was catching up on the blogs I follow in my reader and I stumbled onto Cathy’s wander.essence blog and I felt a connection to Cathy’s philosophy straight away:

In this blog, I seek to mingle travel and art.  I hope to inspire curious explorers of the world to make an art of wandering, and then turn that wandering into art. My focus is on people in later life, usually 50+ folks who have time and money to travel and also want to explore their creative selves in the process.

7300 days to travel with awareness and joy

I’m a fellow creative, and I love to travel, but as I near my mid-50s, I am becoming more and more mindful of my impact on the world, especially when I travel.

Knowing that I may only have between 7300 and 7000 days (if I live to 70 or 75!) left to have adventures, I really want to experience my travels with awareness and joy – not just see them as a list of places to be ticked off.  I sense that I am going to be spending a lot of time reading her posts and I am thanking her in advance for that!

Keeping a travel journal

Who knows why I was drawn to it, but her post about keeping a travel journal was my first port of call. The post opens with:

I too often rely on my pictures to remind me of things, or I mistakenly believe I’ll remember what happened: the conversations I had, my feelings about the journey, the details I noticed, what I marveled over. The fact is, without keeping a journal, I forget the details that bring a place to life. Later, when I sit down to write about my journey, I can’t pull up anything interesting to say.

I have never kept a travel journal with any success. Maybe because as a photographer, I tend to rely heavily on photographs to help me remember. As Cathy says this isn’t always an effective way to remember the details and when I get home, I struggle to recall and write the details of the experience. Many of my memories are lost and merge into one another like the pile of dirty laundry that needs to be done after the trip!

This time it will be different…

I am making a promise to myself, this time it will be different. On Saturday I travel to an African country I have never visited before (Namibia) and I am inspired to try out Cathy’s suggestions and prompts for journaling.

I want to make the most of this new adventure! I started reading them and felt myself getting really excited. Really excited! Thanks, Cathy for sharing so much detail.

via on keeping a travel journal

So I better get on with reading her list of prompts and maybe I might even buy one or two of the books she suggests. Here’s to exploring new ways to travel this weekend!