I fully admit that I'm a total hoarder when it comes to my travel. I save pretty much everything... receipts... ticket stubs... boarding passes... maps... brochures... everything. My thinking has always been that saving all this crap would make it easier to reconstruct my travels so I can remember where I was and what I did while I was there.
Then Blogography came along and all my travels were suddenly being documented.
At least for the past ten years that I've been blogging.
Yet I've still be saving everything out of habit. The problem is that all this stuff has been taking up space and I'm running out of room. And so I've been going through all my boxes of travel crap and throwing out most of it. There's no need to keep a receipt so I can remember the name of that pizza restaurant I like in Cologne, Germany... I just have to Google my blog, and there it is. I don't have to save the ticket stub from the Pet Shop Boys' first concert in Seattle to remember when that was... I just have to Google my blog, and there it is. Having your travels indexed on the internet is just so handy.
But what about my travels before I started blogging? I can't Google a box of crap, so what to do?
One of the ideas I'm toying with is creating blog entries for my earlier travels, then back-dating them. I'm not sure how I feel about the idea though. Is it cheating to have a blog with entries that pre-date blogging? Do I really care? I suppose I could start a second blog for my early travels, but I can't help but think that having everything in one place would be a better way to go.
I just don't know. Guess I'll think about it for a while and see where I land.
All I do know is that I'd love to throw out all this crap I have piled up which covers my travels from 1983 to 2002.
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I save every play stub, restaurant stubs, etc etc too from when I travel. I bundle them up and put them in a bookcase. Sometimes I take them out to remember the experience. I think it’s hard to throw them out because it’s like throwing that time away.
I wish I had the space to keep it all, because it is fun to look back through everything. But I really don’t. So I suppose I’ll keep the essentials, blog the details, then jettison the rest. Then I can look through my old blog entries to remember the experience.
Here’s how I solve that problem: every year I buy one of those desk calendar books. Then I make an informal scrapbook, taping boarding passes, hotel keys, brochures, tickets etc inside on/near the appropriate dates with little notes “Dinner with Fred at the Ritz” etc…Scrapbook/calendar combo. I have about 10 of them & it’s fun to look back and remember what it was I was doing.
If I were just now starting, that might be an option for me. But that’s kind of what my blog is doing for me, so I guess I’ll be okay!
I like the blog idea but I’m confused about why you’d back date or start a new blog? Why not just tell the stories to us now and include the date in the title? It gives you something to talk about on days when there isn’t a lot else to talk about, saves you a bunch of work and keeps things searchable. 🙂
I like the blog idea but I’m confused about why you’d back date or start a new blog? Why not just tell the stories to us now and include the date in the title? It gives you something to talk about on days when there isn’t a lot else to talk about, saves you a bunch of work and keeps things searchable. 🙂
I keep everything as well. Most of it gets pasted into big notebooks to be a travel scrapbook.
I also started backdating holidays, as per my USA 1983 trip.. but then all of my travel blogs have been “sub blogs” in a separate directory underneath my main blog..
It’s your blog, do whatever you want! 🙂 I don’t see any problem with backdating. If you were to write, say, seven posts for a seven day trip, and then link to all seven posts via one post that gets sent to my RSS aggregator, I would love to go back and read about your old trips.
I’d say go for it. Just remember to post a “blast from the past” link at the top of the blog so we all can see it.
What if you scanned everything and stored it on a dedicated thumb drive? You could label the drive, and voila! Years of souvenirs now take up next to no space.
If the information is important to you and you have the means of back-dating your blog, then go for it!
Now, to be “fair” to the whining portion of the greater blogging community, I’d mark each post with the current date as well. I think of this more as an ethical blogging issue than to placate some interweb idiots…..
I don’t think reconstructing earlier trips is cheating, and it’s so much easier nowadays thanks to the Internet. I now write a travel journal a upon completion of each trip (too busy during the trip), using quick notes, receipts, maps, and the I-net to fill in the gaps. About a year ago I decided to do the same documenting of earlier trips as far back as the 80s. Very happy with the results, and got to re-live some great travels. I still save the best brochures and key receipts in separate, dated file folders, though.
I would love to scan and digitize all of my concert tickets, which I save each and every one (even the e-tickets you print out from home).
As for the backdating of posts, I’ve thought about this. I wonder how to get the newest and most recent of older posts up front so that people will know there’s something from 1985 out on the blog.
i was going ot say what erin did…write about it here. no reason you can’t tell us about your day, then go on to tell us about a previous adventure!