Loyal readers may remember that last year, I did a cross-country road trip, during which I had hoped to stop at various local independent shops to look at notebooks, including those that were mentioned in your responses to my call for suggestions. The journey was fascinating and fun, and in the end I didn’t really have time to do much notebook shopping because there was so much other great stuff to do! But I did keep an eye out for notebooks along the way, and about halfway through the trip, I posted a re-cap of what I had seen so far: Cross Country Road Trip Notes. At that point I had only bought one notebook, the Vinylux notebook below:

This was purchased at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, TN, but I have also seen them sold in NYC at the Bryant Park holiday market. The journal itself is pretty basic and I haven’t tested the paper. The front cover has a real slice of a vintage vinyl 45rpm record glued to it, with a Stax-branded thing-a-ma-jiggie in the middle. (If you’re under the age of 40, you probably wouldn’t know what that thing was if you saw it out of context, at least not before the resurgence of interest in vinyl records in the last few years. People my age know what it’s used for, but don’t know what to call it other than thing-a-ma-jiggie.)

After leaving Memphis, I didn’t buy another notebook until I got to California. At the Daiso store in Alameda, I bought this super-cheap Moleskine-clone. A full review is coming soon.

In Berkeley, I found this lovely fish journal at Pegasus Books. The cover is beautiful, and the endpapers and designed pages make it even more elegant and special.

On my way from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe, I stopped for lunch in the charming town of Placerville, CA. There were some cool antique shops, and in one of them, I just couldn’t resist this little vintage diary. The horizontal format is unusual, something I’ve since seen only in one of the diaries I bought on my European trip last fall. Only a few pages of it were used, and some may have been torn out. The first page has notes about the owner’s experiences in Europe during World War II. Another page listed some fellow military officers, performers from a USO team (not shown here, as there were personal details), and some scoring guidelines for marksmanship. The rest doesn’t seem at all war-related– just a few random notes about things like safe deposit box numbers, correspondence, and a list of apple dishes.

That was it for notebook purchases! That makes about one notebook for every 2,250 miles driven. I think I showed admirable restraint… but the other reason I was disinclined to spend money on notebooks was that I had busted my souvenir budget on an impulse pen purchase. I went into a pen shop just hoping to find a cheap mechanical pencil, but I ended up falling in love with a Pilot Justus fountain pen that cost over $300, by far the most I’ve ever spent on a pen (I know all you true fountain pen addicts are like “hold my beer…”). But it’s actually a great pen and a useful addition to my modest collection– the firmness of the nib can be adjusted between being soft and flexible for (attempted) calligraphy, and very fine and firm for everyday writing. It’s like two pens in one… two $150 pens. (You can find it for a lot less on Amazon.)

So I can’t give you the cross-country stationery shop tour that I’d hoped for, but honestly, if you ever have the chance to do a road trip across the USA, don’t spend too much time shopping! Take the back roads, go to national parks, wander through Route 66 ghost towns, eat the craziest food you can find and enjoy all the beautiful places and friendly people that our country has to offer. Fill the notebooks you already own with lots of memories! I sure did.