So we love travelling. We love creating awesome travel memories of our time together as a family. Having the kind of experiences that will be part of us forever. Zip-lining through jungles, sailing to pirate islands, exploring ancient ruins. But when we get home, settle down to our daily routine, how to we keep these travel memories alive?

We create ways to display our travel memories

Now, I’m not the most artistic person in the world… but it’s so easy to create beautiful masterpieces from even your plainest holiday photos. It doesn’t take long spending a few moments in a local artisan market to choose a perfect souvenir that compliments your home decor. It’s rewarding to design a special gift for someone.

Travel memories need prompts

When daily life is grinding on and on, it’s so refreshing to glance up and see one of our travel memories in our home. It reminds us to be thankful for all the great times we’ve shared together.

They help us to keep our passion for wanderlust and travel alive.

I have an awful memory… Like some kind of continuous ‘mummy brain’. I can barely remember what is in the fridge, let alone recall what we experienced deep in the Amazon Rainforest six years ago or how my daughter looked when she was six weeks old. I need prompts, reminders, visual clues.

So here are 5 ways we try and keep our travel memories alive around our home. 

Things that help us to enjoy our travel memories every day.

1.Photos, photos everywhere

Who goes travelling and doesn’t take photos?

We all do (if you don’t then you sound like an interesting person – why not?? Leave a comment). In the digital age, the rest of us are snap-happy clickers. Then we come home, download all those photos, have a chuckle at them and close the laptop down.

Well, don’t. Print them, but not all 2,000 of them. Grab a glass of wine and spend a fun evening with your family choosing your favourites.

By all means, share them on social media with your friends and family too. But put some up in your home. Buy a nice frame and display them.

My kids love to stop in the hallway and point to the photos we’ve displayed. It’s great to recall these memories with them, time and time again. Hopefully, it will help them (even though they are so young) create their own travel memories for the trips that happened when they were babies.

2. Photo Books

Thanks to the glorious worldwide web, self-publishing is a breeze nowadays. There are so many websites where you can find easy-to-use templates into which to write and design your own photo story.

We’ve made two photo books over the years.

Our first book is a hardback copy of an online travelogue that we kept when we went travelling before we had children. One Christmas, I paid someone to copy all the text and photos (it was a HUGE site documenting our travels through over 50 countries). He then designed the book for me and I had it printed.

It was one of my partner’s BEST CHRISTMAS PRESENTS EVER.

Our website was no longer just a virtual entity floating around loosely on the internet. It’s now a solid hardback book sitting on the shelf. Just the thing to pick up and read on a rainy, miserable day – making our travel memories never far away.

Last year, we self-published a much simpler photo book about our 4 month trip to Mexico and the USA. We produced it for our children who at 4 months and 2 years old were never going to have their own clear memories of the amazing time that we’d spent together as a family.

Amongst hundreds of beautiful photos – and lots of very funny, personal ones of us and the kids – we wrote short passages explaining each place that we visited and cute incidents that happened there. As it is for the children, we wrote as if speaking to them.

Now both children have their very own copy to treasure and read in later life. I’m looking forward to many, many nights tucked up in bed, mulling over the pages and reminiscing with them about such wonderful travel memories.

3. Unique gifts to cherish travel memories

As I mentioned before, I’m not a super creative person. I like designing and producing, but my artistic skills are narrow.

As well as gifting personalized photo books (see number 2), there are so many extremely talented artisans and craftspeople who you can find easily using Etsy or Not on the High Street who will create magnificent and totally unique gifts for you.

My absolute favourite find was this globe print that I had created for my partner one Christmas – he LOVES it!

If you look closely you can see stamps for all the countries that we visited on our year overseas before kids. The stamps also include our date of entry to that country to make it extra special – and a great jogger of travel memories and dates.

There are so many other personalised, travel mementos that you can buy online, some classier than others: beautiful prints, keyrings, mouse mats, mugs and even cushions!

4. Globes and Maps

I love maps.  I love globes.

Yes, I have some weird fascination (extending from my wanderlust) whereby I just gravitate towards globes and maps. All that unexplored space, all those mountains and valleys, cities, and oceans.

What a feast for the imagination! What fodder for my wanderlust!

Just a quick look will bring back travel memories and generate future dreams. So yep, we have lots of maps around the house – oh and my very precious globe too!

Historical maps are a real treat for the eyes – as they’re often so beautiful and there’s something really interesting about the changing names and divisions of countries.

I’m also a bit of a history buff. Last year, I saw a 1939 replica globe at the Children’s Museum in Charlotte Amalie, US Virgin Islands and wow, just imagine that pivotal moment in world history which that globe captures!

Talking of maps and creativity, this frame was created by me for pennies. I took a cheap frame that we had lying around and cut out a sheet of wrapping paper – one of those gorgeous old-fashioned map ones that you can buy in gift shops cheaply.

5. Postcards

This is the jewel in my crown of travel memories.

In every country or region that we visit with our son and daughter, we buy them and write a personalised postcard.  They contain everything from the places we visited, new things they’ve achieved like walking and talking, plus a few choice incidents documented to embarrass and amuse them in later life.

Cheap, light and easy to purchase, these tiny pieces of card are helping us create a treasure cove of our family’s very personal travel memories.

6. Other ideas to keep travel memories alive

For years now, we’ve been collecting coins from every country that we visit. We’ve been giving the coins to my partner’s younger sister and wow, does she now have an impressive collection with coins from as far away as Guyana and Mongolia!

Also, and this is an obvious one, but souvenirs also bring back travel memories. Good, old souvenirs. It doesn’t have to be a plastic snow globe or a fridge magnet. We tend to travel light (hence the postcards and photos) but we love buying special overseas, usually from places we’ve loved.

Scattered around our home, we also have cushions covers from Laos, posters from Mexico, ornaments from Namibia and Korea and as always there’s a packet of very out-of-date spices from Morocco plus a big jar of Maple Syrup from Canada.

Before life was all iTunes and Spotify, I used to buy (rip-off) CDs of special songs from my travels. Now, I try and create a digital playlist so that I can relive some of those magic moments at home.

Keeping your travel memories alive will inspire you and give you a wonderful sense of gratitude

Take a minute to be mindful and think of all the wonderful things you have around your home that remind you of your exciting overseas adventures.  I hope that some of the ideas above will resonate with you and perhaps you will try and create more beautiful ways to share your travel memories with your family.

Got a different idea on how to share your travel memories? Please share in the comments. We’d love to hear about it.