I started keeping a travel journal three years ago because I noticed something embarrassing: I could not remember most of my trips.

Not the big things — those stayed. I could tell you I went to Rome in 2018 and Tokyo in 2019 and Marrakech in 2022. I could pull up the photos. I could even remember the names of some restaurants.

But I could not remember the texture. The actual experience of being somewhere. What I had been thinking about while sitting in that café in Trastevere. Who I had spoken to on the train from Kyoto to Osaka. What the air had smelled like in the spice market.

The trips had become summaries. I wanted them back.

The first journal

I bought a small black hardcover notebook in an art supply store. About the size of my hand. Lined paper, around 150 pages. It cost twelve dollars.

I made no rules for the first week. I just wrote in it on the plane, in cafés, in my hotel at night. Some entries were a paragraph. Some were three pages. Some were a single sentence: “Heard a woman singing fado in Alfama tonight. Could not find her again.”

By the end of the trip the notebook was about a quarter full. I read it on the flight home. I was startled by how much I had forgotten in only ten days. The notebook was telling me things my memory had already shed.

What I write now

After three years of doing this, I have settled into a loose template that works for me. Other people’s journaling habits will be different. But here is mine.

Each morning, at breakfast, two pages:

• Where I am. The city, the neighborhood, where I slept.
• What I did yesterday, in plain prose. Not all of it. The two or three things worth keeping.
• Anyone I spoke to and what they said. Especially strangers. The conversations with strangers are the ones I forget fastest.
• One thing I noticed. Anything. The color of a building. The way someone said hello.
• What I am going to do today, in a list of three or four things, not as a plan but as an intention.

Each night, in bed, one page:

• What was the best moment of today.
• One thing I am thinking about that has nothing to do with the trip.
• A name, a place, an idea I want to remember.

That is it. About fifteen minutes of writing a day. By the end of a two-week trip I have thirty or forty pages of dense, specific notes.

What this is not

I want to clear two things up about what this is not.

It is not a diary in the confessional sense. I am not processing my feelings on the page. If something hard is happening in my life I do not write about it here. The journal is for the trip and the trip is, mostly, for the trip. If a feeling needs to be processed I have a different notebook for that.

It is not a blog post in disguise. Some travel writers keep journals that read like draft articles — polished, sentence-by-sentence, with an eye to publication. I have tried this. It does not work for me. The journal is private. It can be ugly. It can have crossed-out sentences and bad drawings of a building I want to remember. If I try to make it good in real time, I stop writing in it.

It is also not a complete record. I have given up the fantasy that I will capture every moment. I capture the moments I have time and attention to capture. The rest go. This is fine.

What you get from it

Three things I did not expect.

You notice more while you are there. Once you start writing things down, you start watching for things to write down. You become a slightly different traveler. You eavesdrop more. You stop more often. You ask more questions. The act of journaling improves the trip, not just the memory of it.

You write better. Even if you are not a writer. After a month of writing two pages a day in a notebook, your sentences get tighter. You learn to say what you mean. This translates to emails, work documents, anything that needs words. It is the cheapest writing class available.

You can read the trip again. Months later, you take the notebook out of the drawer and read it on a Sunday afternoon. The trip comes back, not as a montage but as something close to a re-experience. You remember the temperature of the air. You remember the joke a waiter told you. You remember the way you felt on the second day, before the homesickness set in.

This is what I had wanted. This is what I had been losing.

The bigger thing

I have come to think the journal is not really about travel. It is about attention.

We live in a moment that is hostile to attention. The phone, the algorithm, the steady drip of notifications. Travel is one of the few situations where most of us still pay close attention — the unfamiliar street, the new food, the language we do not speak. Journaling captures that attention before it dissipates.

But the deeper benefit, I am realizing, is that the practice of attention spreads. After three years of journaling on trips, I have started noticing more at home, too. The bus driver who waves at the same regulars every morning. The shape of the bare trees in February. The way my friend stirs her coffee.

I do not journal about home as much as I journal about travel. But I find that some of the muscle has migrated. The habit of looking has stayed.

You can start tonight. A small notebook. A cheap pen. Two pages tomorrow morning. There is no wrong way.

The notebook does not care if your handwriting is bad. It only cares that you keep showing up.