If your follow me over on Instagram, you will probably want to skip this post as it is a wrap-up of the competition I entered over at @raileurope. Rail Europe is sponsoring a contest for two creative people to take a trip via rail over Germany and Switzerland. Their #talesonrail2017 closes today and the winners are to be announced in the next two weeks.
To begin the re-cap, my first entry was about a family trip to Alaska that began me on the journey of keeping a travel journal as I learned (the hard way) that photos just can't tell the whole tale!
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| To read the Instagram post, click here |
From there, I meandered down the back streets of Ybor City, Florida, taking photos of rusty relics:
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| To read the Instagram post, click here |
Those ornery, cantankerous sea lions at Pier 39 from San Francisco, were up next:
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| To read the Instagram post, click here |
Visiting Bass Harbor Light in Maine was another fond memory I shared:
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| To read the Instagram post, click here |
Spending time at John's Pass, Madeira Beach, FL, during the art workshop, Winter Interrupted, was another great page that made it into the contest:
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| To read the Instagram post, click here |
From Clearwater, Florida, I "traveled" to the Crescent City and posted one of my favorite sketches from NOLA:
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| To read the Instagram post, click here |
And I finally concluded with a sunset hovering over the Gulf of Mexico:
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| To read the Instagram post, click here |
As I looked through my travel journals, I was once again amazed at how much I remembered. Not just where I was, but the time of day, what I could see, hear, smell and taste, who I was with and how I was feeling at that moment in time.
When I look at my photos, I don't have that same experience. A portal doesn't open and transport me back to that specific moment in time. For that reason if no other, I suspect I was always keep some kind of journal when I travel, whether it's to the next town over or half-way around the world.
I am just at the beginning of putting a book together. The Art of Travel Journaling will be a labor of love and passion based on just how much I love travel journals and all the ways to fill them to overflowing with the memories of our days.
Whether or not I am awarded a trip, I feel like I've already won as I had an amazing time going back through the sketches and photos, reliving my memories. Without the contest, I may have stumbled over one or two of them, but I wouldn't have paused to put the thought into them as I did for the competition.
And since this is a wrap, let me say thanks to @raileurope for the competition and the opportunity to play. Finally, I'm going to rewrite Rick Blaine's words from Casablanca...
"If you don't [keep that travel journal], you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life."
