WRITING A TRAVEL DIARY: Keeping Memory Fresh

Hidden Lake, Glacier National Park

Before email and texting, people wrote letters and diaries to record their thoughts and experiences. While I have never kept a daily diary, from a young age I have always written a diary or log on summer vacations and trips. These early letters and logs are among my first travel writing. Recently, I rediscovered the diary I wrote when my family visited Glacier National Park on a family camping trip in 1961. My entries note both our activities of the day–hikes, swimming, picnics, a flat tire en route to Waterton Park in Canada--and more mundane issues such as the weather and what we ate. (In one entry I describe making peach cobbler over the campfire. In another, I tell how I burned all the lamb chops for dinner!) You can read a selection of my entries at my travel blog The Intrepid Tourist.  For me, my Glacier trip diary is both a memory jog and a reminder of the importance of writing things down when they are fresh. I never know when sometime in the future those words of the moment might inspire a new story.