Prepping my travel journal

I've mentioned before that I've prepped a travel journal for our trip to Germany and France. If everything goes as planned it'll be filled quite a bit by now, but I want to show you how I prepared my journal. The journal will be written in dutch, so I'll translate what I've written so far. (Oh, and sorry for the bad image quality, these were taken with my phone in baaaad light...)

This is my first travel journal, I've always made photobooks after the event happened. Or at least, I've always wanted to make them, because I just never got to it. So this year, inspired by  a recent post by Amy and an old post by Elise, I decided to try something different. I've got a travel journal ready to go. I won't be crafting the book together during the trip, since we're backpacking (I always have enought trouble getting everything I need into that darn bag). I will definitely be journaling, collecting ephemera along the way, and taking pictures with this journal in mind (which is an enthire new and fun challenge). I hope it will turn out as fun as I have in mind, and if not... Ah well, it's always better than nothing :)

The front and back are made out of a cardboard box I had lying around. I painted them a sort of rusty color, and added 'summer 2013' in dutch, with white paint. Not all cities and towns we will visit are known yet, but we do know we'll start in Medeback, Germany, and end in Taizé, France. So I wrote those on there already, and I'll add the rest after we get back. 

To the inside of the cover I adhered an old map of parts of the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France and even a bit of Switzerland. I had already decided I wanted to add a map, but I found out that the location of Taizé is visible at the very bottom of the map, as well as the rest of our destinations. Awesome. I'll be adding some sort of route on there when we get back. I'm still debating on how, though. 

The first page shows my vacation-manifesto. Since this trip will be a little different from our usual vacations, I decided to write out some 'goals' for this trip. I ended up with ten things I would really like to do in these weeks:

Steefjes Plans

Enjoy

Play boardgames

Take pretty pictures

Read, read, read!

Hike

Run in nature

Time for the two of us

Eat good food

Get to know new people

Make memories

Let's Go!

The rest of the book is kind of boring so far: it's a mix of graph paper, lined paper, cardstock and envelopes. I've divided the trip into three parts using colors: yellow and green for the trip with Imres family, pink and red for the part where it's just the two of us, and light & dark blue for our week in Taizé. 

For each day we're away I've added two pages: one lined and one graph paper. Perhaps I won't use all of them, and that would be just fine. But I figured this way I'll have enough paper if things turn into a journaling frenzy :)

The backside has Albert Heijn wrapping paper attatched to it. I liked its summer vibe :)

 Right now the book is bound by 1 inch book rings. I won't be adding anything but words to it along the way, so for now that's just fine. When we get back I'll be adding a lot of photo's and ephemera I've collected, and I'll probably change the rings to 2 inch or maybe even bigger ones. 

I'm super excited to fill my travel journal with stories along the way, and maybe even more excited to add the photo's and stuff once we get back. Perhaps I'll show the progress in the meantime, but I'll for sure be sharing this baby once it's done!