There is no hangover quite so strong and painful as the days or weeks following a long holiday. Sitting in an office lamenting the lack of hot weather and thinking of brilliant white sandy beaches and restaurants that served seafood and cocktails and… regular life just doesn’t cut it in comparison.
However, I’ve found a few ways to overcome the winter blues and replace them with ocean blues…
Share it on social media
Social media is a great on-the-go way of preserving and sharing your memories. It can also be a method for shaping the trip as it goes. You never know what mid-trip suggestions or hookups you’ll get via social media. Try using hashtags and asking questions about recommended restaurants, great drinking spots, activities and cultural locations. Who knows — maybe one of your friends will be in the same spot at the same time!
You can also use Pinterest to do the heavy lifting of planning beforehand, just by searching for your desired destination and seeing what pops up. It’s also great for keeping track of all the places you’ve visited. I made a Pinterest board and Pinned all the places I’ve traveled to, and when, with a comment or two and my favorite picture from that trip.
For public photo sharing, use Instagram to record and show off your superb images; a private account for your kids will let them record their photographs on-the-go. There are lots of services that will turn your Instagram pics into albums, magnets, posters, etc. with almost no effort from you.
I also like to make private Google Photos albums and share them with friends and family. If you install the Google Photos app on your phone (and Picasa on your computer), you can set it to automatically backup all your photos (you may want to set this to WiFi-only if you’re not on an unlimited roaming mobile data plan), just in case you lose your phone.
When I have the time, I make photobook yearbooks and albums of all the places we went. I print them up for myself and my parents — they love them, and it’s a nice way to look back and appreciate the past years. I’ve tried a bunch of services for this and found MyPublisher to produce the best quality photos in their photobooks. Although they have less fun design options (like stickers, etc.), the ones they do have are sophisticated and elegant, which is what I like. And they have lots of sales, so sign up for their newsletter and you can make the photobooks now, and wait for a sale to buy. Make sure to save an ‘export’ / backup of the photobook file somewhere safe, and always get ‘super gloss printing’ (it’s worth it).
Turn it into wall art
Once you’ve booked epic trip number two (or maybe more), it’s time to relive other adventures, in giant form. Photobox personalised prints are a great place to start. They can help you make collages, montages or giant scenes and print them on hard-wearing canvas. These can then be used to breathe life into plain rooms at home or revitalize an office.
Who remembers digital frames? No-one seems to have them on their shelves anymore, for various reasons (lack of interactivity and picture quality). Sales fell through the floor but the newer models prove the product might be on its way back, such as this 4k Klio version.
Write about it
Writing about your experiences is a great way of reliving them, and preserving memories that might fade away. You could try writing an article about the destination you went to and submitting it to established publications like Urbanette. It’s a great boost to your CV, and a published article is a great memento of your trip (and writing acumen!)
It might even push you into learning coding/design, although new web templates allow you to upload and create splendid galleries with little technical knowledge. Remember to always break up text with video, pictures and social media statuses.
Go old-school, in a new way
I know, I know. Who uses paper calendars anymore? My mom, for one. Digital is in nowadays, but there’s something to be said for old-school paper calendars. Not only do photo calendars enable you to plan your year ahead – including that trek through Europe that you’ve always wanted to tackle – but they also let you relive past glories. It’s a year today since you reached that temple in Cambodia and five years since the week in Morocco – awesome times.
Don’t want a monthly calendar? Get a cool daily one using 365 of your Instagram photos. Same your favorites and stick them on a cork board.
Make your memories POP
Whatever you make with your photos, make sure to edit them first. And I don’t mean to remove wrinkles or zits. BeFunky will make your photos POP by adjusting the brightness, contrast, saturation, etc. You can even add filters, text and cool effects. Oh yeah — and you can fix that pesky zit, too.
Go again
The easiest way to reduce the symptoms of travel sickness is to book another trip. Perhaps you’ll visit the same twisting lanes and street food again, or maybe this time you’ll trek jungles or mountains. Devote a morning to researching the possibilities (check out our Destination Guides or Adventure Travel articles), recruit friends and/or family, get out your credit card, and set off on another memorable trip!
What do you do when you want to relive your vacations?
Where do you want to go next?
I am so terrible about doing anything with my photos, great suggestions! (-:
Those personalised prints idea is to die for! SO cute! For what it’s worth I always take too many photos, of everything! Like breakfast food and dirt on street. 😀
Love these!! I was a scrapbooker too. Scrapbooking is so much time and money. With online journals and blogs being free it just doesn’t measure up. I’m so glad you posted this today because I’m leaving for Florida tomorrow and I LOVE your calendar idea. Now I need to pick one out. Exciting!
My house is full of photo albums and scrapbooks that none of us bother to take a look anymore. So I lost interest in keeping travel memories. But your article gave me the will to go back to it again, but in a more modern way! Thank you.
What a great article, Hilary! It brings out not only the best ways to keep the warm fuzzies of travel, but also teaches lots of new cool things like BeFunky and personalised prints 🙂
You never run out of superb idead, do you? 😉 Splendid article. Love all the ideas! Thank you so much for the links too. I’m checking them all out to decide which one is best for me.
Thank you for this. This is a lovely article! The photobox personalised prints sounds spectacular! I can’t wait to try it.
Wonderful article! I’ve come across so many new ideas here that never once crossed my mind although me and my family travel quite a lot because of my husband’s job!
We collect souvenirs but have a rule that souvenirs have to be useful. Books, pencils, sun hats, second-language DVDs, cooking utensils, hair accessories, t-shirts and hoodies and food items are allowed. It keeps useless clutter down and you’re reminded of your trips as you go about your daily life. our one exception is snow globes. my daughter has a growing collection, but we try to find small ones that won’t explode in the luggage.
I used to bring a journal, but due to the rapid change of technology, my physical diary got replaced by a more efficient and modern way of journaling: Blogging. I use blogging to share my opinions, express thoughts, daily activities, travel, and experiences in life… thru blogging I can say what I want to say and get heard by other people. When writing a blog, write a topic that makes you happy and comfortable like posting your travel destinations, what are the good places in there and what you did there. I think blogging is really a great way to revisit and relive your travel memories.
Geniunely love your ideas! Thanks for sharing with us 🙂
Me and the hubby have been back six months and actually this week is the anniversary of our departure, so very topical for me! We are also not big on souvenirs. I blogged while we were away and actually we have a lot of video footage to go through still. I also kept a journal, so between that and the blog it’s nice to go back to read.
I think for us the biggest way to keep them alive is FOOD. reminiscing about meals, thinking and talking about the foods we had abroad that we can’t get here. It’s painful! Ha.
I love the concept of food to keep memories alive! We eat Asian food a lot here in Boston and it does remind me of feasts I have had overseas. I will have to work that into conversations with the kids as well 🙂
I took so much video footage on one of my trips and I have never watched any of it, so I gave up on that. I hope you have greater success with yours!!