Everyone loves travelling, but the memories are what truly last. One of the best ways to keep track of all the memories you make while away is by maintaining a travel journal. Bringing along a travel journal on your next trip? Here are a few out-of-the-box ideas to make it extra special. Don’t forget to include text entries and photos, too!

1. Pour a bit of sand from the beach into a flat bag and attach it to a page in your journal. Label the bag with the beach where you got the sand. Include the date, too. If you often visit the beach on vacation, you can start quite the collection! This’ll take up much less room than if you put sand in bottles and brought them home.
2. Add money to your journal, like small coins that you can secure to the page or bills from foreign places. Don’t include a lot, though. Most of that money would be better spent by donating it to the homeless in your host country. Or, if you travel to that country a lot, hold on to some of it to use next time you’re there.
3. Take rubbings of graves, metal grates, signage, or paving stones in your journal. Put a note next to the rubbings of what it is and where you took it.
4. Keep receipts from some of your memorable adventures. The bonus to keeping receipts from foreign countries is that they’ll have foreign language printed on them.
5. Press dried flowers, herbs or leaves from hikes or other outdoor trips in the pages of the journal. Every time you flip it open to reminisce about your trip, you’ll have pretty florals waiting to greet you.
6. Keep tags from souvenirs or clothing. This may not seem like much at first, but after a stay in a foreign country, you may want to be reminded of every single thing. Plus, if you get rid of those souvenirs someday, you’ll still have something to remember them by.
7. Hold on to coasters from bars you hung out at during your trip. Keep these in your journal and take an extra one to use as an actual coaster at home. Not sure where you want to travel to during your next vacation? Check out Blue Green Resorts online.
8. Keep flattened bottles caps from any bottles of beer or soda you drank during your trip. This is especially fun if trying new drinks was a big part of your vacation, like if you went on pub crawls at your destination. Odds are that a different country or state will have different beverages you never tried before.
9. If you love a certain landscape, see if a street artist has a sketch or painting of that specific vista. Look for one that’s small enough to keep in your journal. Or, if you’re artsy, draw or paint the image yourself in your journal.
10. Hold onto luggage tags that have specific information about the destination. Some luggage tags are too flimsy to be reused, making your journal a perfect place for them to remain after your trip. You can also write notes on the luggage tags to remind you of specifics of your trip, like the airports you landed in along the way.

By collecting a number of items from your trip, your travel journal will double as a scrapbook. Some people like to create a new journal for each trip, while others continue filling the same journal until there aren’t any pages left. To make collecting items easier, look for a journal that has some pockets in it to store items until you’re ready to secure them to the pages.