Seeing Tim's post about his Ticket Journal website had me wondering. How many of you keep a journal or diary while you're on the road?

A few years back I decided to start keeping a journal on my baseball road trips. I bought a few 4x6"-ish leather backs at Target. I remembered always writing in one when we went camping as a family when I was younger. At the time, it all seemed pretty tedious because the entries didn't have a lot of variety. Camping was still mostly camping wherever we went, my parents were still in the camper, I was still in my tent, and we were in the woods somewhere. I realized into my new travels that each trip is different. Sure the parks are different, but more importantly the cities are different, the sites, the food. So I started keeping a journal. I pulled any past posts I'd had up on parks I'd been too and did my best to backdate it, then started keeping a realtime list.

Where was I? Where did I eat? Did I go anywhere (besides the park)? If I was traveling across the state, what was the state like? How were the people? Did I meet anyone, what were there names? In the now, it's interesting to go and re-read. In the future, after I'm dead and gone, it's a chance for my kids or grandkids to read about it in my own handwriting.

After I'd started doing this, my wife and I went to my Grandma's to spend the weekend. As we were talking about my Grandpa, who had passed away years earlier, she pulled down his old travel logs from when he was in the Army in WWII. He wasn't stationed overseas, he was stationed mostly in Texas before getting a medical discharge. Even though he hadn't seen any "action", it was a great read. It talked about how things were in the Army, talked about how he was doing at cards, if he had paid for dinner that night on the winnings. Just really cool stuff.

If I had one moment where I was really glad I started keeping a log, it was on my Texas trip. A friend and I flew into Dallas and hit Arlington, before driving across the state to Houston. As it happened, we hit Houston at the same time that Katrina hit New Orleans. There were so many Louisiana plates in Houston that you would have thought we were in New Orleans. Every hotel was booked, the hotel we were at had police there when we got there, because there had literally been fights for rooms. I remember, and wrote down, how I felt bad that we couldn't stay somewhere else and give up our room. We listened to people telling stories about what they just left while we were at the ballgame. At least all of them could afford to leave town. I had wanted to hit the Astrodome when we were in Texas, but we couldn't, because it was suddenly full of "refugees". It was that kind of trip that I was happy I was keeping a journal, because I went to Texas to "just" see a few games, and left having had a different experience. Every trip hasn't been that impactful, thankfully, but it's still fun knowing where I ate, what I saw, what my favorite part of the trip was, etc.

Anyone else keeping a log? What's your favorite experience, or most memorable?

Doug