Souvenirs can be such a fun way to mark your memories of camping and travel. But I don’t like to have lots of clutter in my house–which means more things to collect dust, and I hate to dust–so our family has found a few creative ways to document our camping and travel adventures. Here’s a roundup of our favorite ideas:
One of the first things we started doing was picking out an ornament to represent each trip we took. This started with our honeymoon to the Great Smoky Mountains and now each year our Christmas tree is adorned with a variety of mementos marking our memories through the years.
This map hangs in our living room and has “pins” to mark the places we go. It’s a neat way to personalize our living space with reminders of the fun we have had as a family. And it’s a great conversation starter with guests who visit our home.
Many people have these sticker maps on their campers and they, too, are a fun visual way to track your travels. We can’t wait until the whole map is filled up!
Jarrett purchased a hiking stick a few years back and then discovered that many locations sell hiking stick medallions. So now he is collecting medallions to mark the places he’s hiked.
This rock collecting idea is über frugal, and something even young kiddos can help with. It can also turn into a great educational tool for teaching children about geology!
For the kids, you can’t beat the price, simplicity, and compact size of collecting pressed pennies. It’s become commonplace for museums, national parks, state parks, landmarks, zoos, and even amusement parks to have a custom pressed penny machine, often located near the gift shop. And for the cost of $.51, even children can afford the price tag.
So now that I’ve finished highlighting the various ways we have marked our adventures over the years, I can’t help but think we *might* have a souvenir collecting problem. (There are worse problems we could suffer from, right? 🙂 ) What things do you do to remember your camping trips and travels?
Love these! Magnets and T-shirts are our souvenirs of choice. I always want to do ornaments, but I get sticker shock at the prices in a lot of places! Of course, if I could give up the t-shirt habit, I could replace it with ornaments, and no one would outgrow them….
I know what you mean about ornament sticker shock! I probably should have detailed our secret to that: We usually look for a keychain that can be easily modified into an ornament (take off the key ring and either string a ribbon or ornament hook through the hole). Most keychains are around $5-7, compared to many ornaments in the $15-25 range.
National parks passport book and lapel pins from places we visit that we put in frames in the hall of s&b house.
Hi William–thanks for stopping by and reading! Great idea to put the pins in display frames!
We have a fantastic postcard collection! We send ourselves postcards all along our route as we travel, documenting our exciting adventures. Then, when we get home, our mailbox is full of beautiful photos of the locations we visited, postmarked from those places the dates we were there, with descriptions of the fun we shared, in our own handwriting. I especially treasure the ones my daughter has written as she has traveled with me 🙂
Hi Sarah–thanks for stopping by! I LOVE, LOVE this idea! What a treasure that will be for generations! How do you recommend storing them–in a box, photo album?
I collect fabric patches and sew on a quilt for the RV couch. Even have my son picking up patches from his world travels. Hubby gets hat pins or key chains or belt buckles.
Hi Cheryl–thanks for stopping by! And what a cool idea! Thanks for sharing! 🙂