Biffybeans has a review of an interesting travel journal.
Although I’m sure this is a great product for some people, I was somewhat turned off by the highly formatted nature of the pages:
Sometimes it’s nice to be prompted to enter certain data, but for the most part, I think I am more of a free-form person, and would prefer to just take my own notes about places I visit. These pages, for me, would probably have too little space for “grub and grog” and too much space for “recommended guidebook” etc. It would end up just being messy and inefficient.
Do you ever use notebooks that are pre-formatted with spaces for specific information, or do you prefer to use totally blank books?
I’m not sure how much use I’ll personally get out of this book because I like to write free-form as well. I did however, take it along one time and used the formatted pages to do a restaurant review…
I do really like how well it’s made…the paper…the cover…it’s a great product.
I really love the idea of this structured notebook/journal as I think it will actually benefit my more free form travel journaling in the long run. I think that when you’re out and about, you can perhaps fail to experience what’s going on around you, if you are too attuned to wanting to record it all for posterity. It’s that old adage of the people in photograph not really experiencing that which they wish to be photographed doing, because they’ve stopped for one brief moment to step outside of that spontaneous moment and posed for an unnatural snapshot. But I digress..
I think that if you are wanting to be as accurate and detailed as possible when writing a travel journal, something like this would be great to prompt you into jotting down the bare bones and the actual-factual stuff, so that you had a great aide memoir to refer back to later on when composing a more rounded journal entry come evening time.
I hate it when I try to write everything the way it really was ON TOP of jotting down all my thoughts and feelings about it too, only to find that halfway through my entry I’ve forgotten half of the details I wanted to get down on paper. I think I’d love to use the structured journal throughout the day and refer to it when writing a fuller retrospective journal entry later on.
Just my two pence worth!!
What is the purpose of the travel? Is it work related and will these questions be of use to the job at hand? Or is this travel for personal reasons? either way, it seems a bit too limiting. If it’s for business, this may help in planning what information to look for, but it is only a starting point in my opinion. If the travel is for pleasure, where’s the fun and spontaneity?
As my Daddy would say, “That’s just too much sugar for a dime.”