Hawaii Travel Journal

I've shared some of the photos from my week-long vacation in Hawaii this summer, and also gave a peek into the little kit of art supplies I took along with me for my journaling.  Today, I'll give you a look at some of the pages in my travel journal. 

This card commemorates our ELEVEN HOUR layover in the Denver airport...ouch!
My chubby airplane kind of bugs me, but oh well...

I have a new favorite way to keep a travel journal while I'm on a big vacation.  When I went to Alaska a couple summers ago, I took a stack of index cards, some of which I had "gussied up" ahead of time with tape and stickers.  I used all the different pamphlets I collected on our cruise and the port stops to create collages on the index cards, and wrote details of our daily activities on the back of postcards I purchased at our various destinations.  When I got home, I collected them into a stack, hole punched them, and connected them with a binder ring.  Voila!  It was such a simple way to collect all the ephemera and stories from our trip.  I made one of those Shutterfly photo books over a year later, and was able to flip through the cards for all kinds of fun details to include in my captions.

I planned to do the same type of journal for Hawaii, but at the last minute I decided to create a little book out of cereal-box cardboard.  I covered the cardboard in my most "Hawaiian-spirited" duct tape, used a Japanese screw punch to make holes in the spine for the binder rings, and filled it with index cards and index-card-sized papers in what I saw as beach-y, ocean-y colors.  

We finally made it to Waikiki, and eventually to Kailua!  E komo mai means "welcome".

Oh, poor Katy...If a man-o-war was going to sting anyone, it was going to be her!

This time, we stayed in one place for the whole week, and it was a bit more of a relaxing beach vacation, and less of a sight-seeing sort of vacation, so there weren't as many postcards involved.  But you can see how I used the cards to capture the stories and details of our trip. 

Our morning hike to Manoa Falls

A two-hour horseback ride at Kualoa Ranch

My husband's trip to Pearl Harbor and my shopping excursion in Kailua

The Chief's Luau at Sea Life Park...a spectacular view and a great fire dance

At the back, I made some collages of words and images from some free publications I picked up in shops in Kailua. 

Now I have a bright, fun, detailed source of summer Hawaiian memories!  If you would like to read through my Top 10 Hawaiian Memories, with photos from the trip, check out this earlier post.