What the Photos Didn’t Capture: The Case for Keeping a Travel Journal

I’ve read many articles about the benefits of journaling but had never tried it.  The few times I considered it, I couldn’t find the correct notebook, a decent pen, or the motivation to scribble thoughts in my undecipherable handwriting.

But when my husband, Henri, and I decided to take a family gap year in Europe with our eight-year-old twins, I vowed to document every detail. I knew it would likely be the most adventurous, best year of our lives and I wanted to remember everything.

So each day, I typed, dictated, or wrote down all the places we’d visited, the food we’d eaten, the people we’d met, and—most importantly—the accompanying emotions.  Sometimes I ended up with pages of properly crafted paragraphs and some days with messy bullet points.

Without the emotional component of journaling, we'd have been left with incomplete timelines and selective memories, with the small and unpleasant moments conveniently filtered out. Don’t get me wrong, I treasure our thousands of pictures, especially the candid ones and those that capture solitude and silence. But our smiling faces don't tell the whole store.

The twins can often recall the major sights in the seventeen countries we visited, but they struggle to visualize our less-than-ideal accommodations or the quaint cafés where we ate breakfast. My optimistic husband has mostly forgotten the inevitable meltdowns, the exhaustion, and the moments we all annoyed each other.

Yet the time between visiting UNESCO World Heritage sights and world-class museums is when we grew the most. I want my kids to remember that our strength developed when things went wrong and we were at our wits’ end—and a great experience isn’t made of perfect pictures on social media.

When we returned to the States, I had four-hundred-and-fifty-pages documenting our wildest dream and its imperfect execution. With it, I accomplished one of my loftiest goals and wrote a book, silencing doubt that I have skills beyond medicine. Friends and colleagues have told me that they can hear my voice while reading it, which is one of the best compliments I could imagine.

My daughter has dyslexia and doesn’t find reading enjoyable. A few weeks after Family Funishment: Seventeen Countries in One Gap Year was published, I noticed her crying while holding her e-reader.  She’d downloaded my book and the happy memories had brought tears to her eyes.  I hope she and her brother always go back to our story and hear me reminding them of my love and their incredible strength.

All of it this was made possible but scribbling down whatever I could manage each day.  Even on shorter trips, I try to let photos capture the big moments and use my words to fill in the gaps.

The real magic isn’t in the destination; it’s in the details, and journaling keeps it alive.