I’ve been enjoying my cross-country trip so far! It hasn’t involved a whole lot of notebook sightings but here are a few so far.
At the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, TN, I bought this Vinylux journal. I’d seen these before at a holiday fair in NYC and didn’t buy one, but the Stax version was the perfect souvenir of my visit.
Also in Memphis, the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel had some journals for sale in the gift shop, including these:
In the Route 66 Museum in Clinton, OK, I spotted a field notebook in a display about surveyors laying out roads.
At the Georgia O’Keeffe studio/house in Abiquiu, NM, there were some tantalizing binders that contained all her records of her own and Alfred Stieglitz’s works, with typewritten labels. No photos allowed indoors, unfortunately!
One of the gift shops at the Grand Canyon had some small wirebound journals for sale:
Aside from notebooks available for sale along my journey, of which there were fewer than you’d expect, you may be wondering if I’m keeping a travel journal. Of course I am! I wish I could say it was a beautiful journal full of detailed, colorful sketches and descriptions, but it’s not. I am keeping a sketchbook for drawings, and using my normal daily journal to record memories of where I’ve been. The journal also has a lot of pages of random notes and pasted-in mementos that look like this:
Not pretty, but it’s still a good representation of my trip! I’m having a great time and hope I’ll have more to report on notebooks across America in the coming days!
Nice! On my first trip along the eastern half of route 66, I stopped at a random little army surplus store and ended up with a bunch of Rite in the Rain notebooks and ammo/messenger bags for my notebooks and pens and pencils. :)
So glad you got to see the Stax Museum. My visit there brought back so many memories of my college days in Memphis in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Notebooks weren’t much of a thing back then, but I did buy my first Montblanc 149 after seeing it in a store window in downtown Memphis in 1967. It cost $35!