Travel Journals: the Mundane and the Moving

Brian and I have recently considered drawing up our wills. So far, we mostly talk about it over rum and tonics with a healthy squeeze of lime, or a bracing prickly pear margarita.

You’d think it would be an easy process. We don’t have kids, we’re not bazillionaires, we don’t have a terrible secret that would be best left unexposed after we die.

What we do have is objects we’ve collected while traveling. Curated items that have remained with us despite periodic purges, like our latest move from a 2400 square foot house plus garage to an 840 square foot condo without as much as a storage locker. Without a guest room even.

What complicates will-making for us is that we also have, of course, private stuff: financials, partly written poems and essays (If there’s a God, smite that file with a thunderbolt when I die); old letters, anniversary cards. Oh, and porn. Hahaha! Just checking that you’re still reading this. Moving on…

My niece came to visit us in Austin this summer, and, as family conversations often go when one party to the conversation is elderly and unlikely to last through dinner, the topic of what to do with our stuff came up. Erica asked if we would leave our travel journals to her in our wills, the idea being to sit with a glass of wine, read about our travels and marvel at our insights, smiling at the occasional globetrotter’s wisecrack.

I’d have to redact so much that the journals would look like transcripts of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes.

My first thought was, Damn, I forgot to think about what to do with our travel journals! Then I said, No way, baby.

You see, I’ve had our old travel journals sitting on my writing table for months, including a stack of them from a year-long journey by VW camper van in Europe and North Africa. I leaf through them now and again when writing about a place or an encounter. Looking at the journals can make for a good time, seeing those places and experiences again through the eyes (and pen) of my younger self.

Reading them also makes me squirm. My early travel journals are full of mundane details about changing money (changed 200 $ to £ at Royal Bank of Scotland this morning), whining about the weather (It rained all day. Again.) and getting ripped off, in tandem with griping about prices.

After that conversation, I spent a few hours randomly selecting pages of four notebooks spanning that year in our camper van to see if they were worth passing on for posterity. Turns out that when you live in a VW camper van for a year , you write a lot about showering. More accurately, about not showering. You dream about being clean and try to remember what that feels like.

There are other, similarly unremarkable journal entries about:

• Car trouble: oil leak, cv joint, broken windows (receipts included)
• Health worries: post-cancer exams, intestinal difficulties, and sinus infections. (receipts included)
• Foul moods, petty arguments and boredom (mostly explained by weather, car trouble and health worries.)
• Documenting (apparently) everything we ate or drank, (receipts not included!)- Cornish pasties, scrumpy, spaghetti Bolognese with horse meat in Sevilla; café com leite in Portugal, tagine in Fez, paté and a peculiarly pungent saucisson in Caen, France, that transported us lickety-split to the original barnyard.

But far more compelling, sandwiched between the rubbish, are entries about things we saw and did. Such as:

• History of places and people, like the folks who rowed the Cornwall Pilot Gig Association’s lifesaving boats and saved hundreds of lives from stranded or sinking ships.
• People we met who gave us insight into life lived in those spots. Mike & Sheila in Guildford; Craig and Alison, touring by motorcycle in Morocco; the Berber girls in Tafroute who helped me with my Arabic.
• List of things we found in second-hand markets: half packs of birth control pills.
• List of Scenes from a Cafe in Moulay Bouselham, a small seaside village in Morocco.
• Having an entire ancient town of Roman ruins to ourselves at dawn, aside from the guard who mostly patrolled his lunch and cigarettes.
• Dashed expectations about places we had long looked forward to—Stonehenge with three busloads of tourists in pouring rain, with fenced off stones—followed by delight at discovering the ‘undiscovered’ village of Cadgwith in Cornwall.
• Our experience in smuggling cigarettes into Gibraltar to sell on the black market and buying a new mattress with the proceeds.
• An unexpected trip aboard a steam-powered boat on the Basingstoke Canal.
• The sensory bombardment of traveling to a new place every day or two.
• Isolation, especially when traveling independently in foreign countries.
• Books we read. Second-hand bookstores.

There is some cool stuff there, right? Yes, but it didn’t change my mind about leaving our travel journals for future generations. To feel comfortable about that, I’d have to redact so much that the journals would look like transcripts of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes.

The good news is I’m heading out on another trip this fall, and reading those old journals prompted me to up my travel journal game. I’ve bagged my customary spiral notebook, replacing it with a classic moleskine, unlined, encouraging me to write (and draw) outside the lines. It’s ready to pack, along with a couple of pens I love, a non-photo blue pencil for initial sketches, pack of colored pencils, and black Flair pen. To be honest, I can’t draw at all, but my stickmen kick some ass.

To prepare me (or maybe just loosen my conviction that I can’t draw), I’ve turned to Lynda Barry’s Syllabus. That’s teaching me to pay closer attention to what I see, do, and hear, and to draw without over-thinking or judging. Plus, it’s super-fun to draw at the end of my day.

There may be a travel journal in that will after all.