Travel Memories: Choosing Keepsakes & Souvenirs to Capture Your Traveling Adventures by Samantha Aleman

I love to travel. If I’m not planning my next adventure, I’m daydreaming about it. I love everything about traveling: experiencing a new culture, dining on a foreign cuisine and seeing the famous landmarks that I only read about in books as a child. Reading travel books from front to back has fueled my desire to see the world.

What I don’t love, however, is trying to find a keepsake that reminds me “I’ve been there.” How can you possibly sum up an entire adventure into a small little trinket? What can I purchase to preserve those memories for years to come without cluttering my house even more than it already is with a 3-year-old?

Since I couldn’t come up with an idea myself, I was curious about what other travelers pick up on their journeys. Their responses are below. Despite the possibility of mass clutter, I kind of want to try them all!

• “My aunt collects pewter spoons. My oldest daughter collects mini snow globes and my younger daughter collects magnets.”

• “Christmas ornaments!”

• “I always got shot glasses.”

• “Magnets sometimes, but mostly postcards. I have like 300 of them.”

• “Historically, magnets. Now hoodies or t-shirts we’ll actually wear so things aren’t just collecting dust.”

• “Keychains! I’ve found really cool ones over the years.”

• “We have a small stuffed animal our kids picked out. He goes in a bag for every trip we go on and he has his own journal that logs every trip.”

• “Send a postcard back to yourself from where you go and write some of your favorite things about the day/trip/culture and then hole punch them and make them into a book.”

• “We collect smaller pieces of art made by local artists. We have some amazing prints from Quebec, some handmade pottery from Costa Rica and a watercolor painting from when we went to South Dakota.”

• “My daughter collects pins. My mom collects those little spoons that serve no purpose.”

What do you bring back as souvenirs or reminders of your travels?