101 Ways of Using your Map Journal

1. To *highlight your holiday adventures*… forever 🙂
2. Most maps only tell you where to go… Map journals help you remember where you’ve been
3. Simply summarize your trip on this single A2 sheet
4. Don’t forget the name of that gorgeous little restaurant you visited! Ask the waiter to jot down its name in one of the jotting boxes on your Map Journal when you go to pay (or if they have a rubber stamp, even more fun!)
5. Ask the concierge to write in the name of the place you’re staying (it’ll also come in handy for finding your way back 😉 )
6. When getting someone to take your photo, get them to also jot in the name of the attraction you’re visiting ~ You’ll be amazed how handwriting styles vary across the world
7. Asking directions? Get them to draw a mud map in one of the boxes ~ It’ll make a great memento, as well as getting you to where you want to go!
8. Never forget a place-name again…
9. Everyone goes on holiday at some time or another ~ Give a Journal Map as a thoughtful gift – they’ll love you for it over and over in years to come every time they open it and reminisce
10. Dot… dot… dot…your…trails…on…the…map
11. Jot… jot… jot… your tales in the boxes
12. Stick your Map Journal on the wall with some photographic thumbnail prints scattered around the central hand-drawn pictorial map
13. Give a slide show of photos on your computer – and use your Map Journal to save going cross eyed switching ‘windows’ between photo… google map… photo. Map journals are the perfect accompaniment for illustrating the spacial relationship of where all those wonderful photos were located
14. Fun for showing and sharing your holidays over tea & biscuits (a tinny, or a glass or two of your favourite beverage!)
15. With no worries of boring your family and friends by producing that tome recording every l-a-b-o-r-i-o-u-s detail 🙁
16. Not a travel-writer? A Map Journal is your Saviour – with a few dots and the odd jot, the job’s done
17. Record art exhibitions you’ve been to this year
18. Life journeys ~ Life highlights ~ Let the map in the middle be your metaphor for where you’re going, where you’ve been, your life’s journey
19. Year at a glance ~ record monthly highlights of your new business venture – you’ll be pleasantly surprised at year’s end when you can ‘see’ what you’ve accomplished
20. Tablecloth at a picnic – Let the remnants of the meal help tell the story
21. What could be more beautiful than a paper boat made out of one? (Send us a photo of one you’ve made and we’ll send you a replacement map for free 😉
22. Paper airplane would be cool to see too, while you’re at it
23. Going on a train trip ~ The Ghan, the Sundowner, the Indian Pacific…
24. Christmas journal ~ Each year get everyone to write in their highlight of the day
25. Collate weekend breaks away in the caravan so you can see all the places you went to this year
26. Give it to one of the 350,000 caravan owners in Australia (or an RV owner for that matter)
27. Give it to an aunt going off on a coach tour for a few days/weeks
28. Doing some day tours ~ Use a box per outing to record all your excursions over the course of the year.
29. Ask people you meet on each trip to sign their name on your Journal Map (and get them to add their personal highlight too)
30. Going bush… off to the outback on a 4WD trek
31. Motorbike trip (such as the #BlackDogRide that takes place each September)
32. Create a Post Office Passport getting an individual stamp in each town as you pass through
33. Heading off over the horizon
34. Setting out to do the big lap (right around Australia)
35. Why wait for that big trip (it may never happen) when all those small trips are just as worthy of remembering and collectively will amount to soooo much more?
36. Celebrate the short breaks that don’t warrant a journal
37. Take a Map Journal on what you think of as a non-journeying holiday
38. For flying visits – – – dash – – – dash – – – dash – – – to – – – your – – – destination
39. Arrow in where you are when you get there
40. And where you’ve come from to visually show the relationship
41. Pictorial maps possess the unique ability to snapshot entire landscapes succinctly onto a single sheet
42. Plot and dot your personal path along the highways and byways as you travel and traverse new terrains…
43. Interrelate the map and jotting boxes by arrowing in where events occurred
44. Map Journals are presented in a clear plastic travel wallet that protects the map in the front pocket…
45. And preserves every true traveller’s treasure trove of ticket stubs and personal memorabilia in the back pocket
46. Get it out and incorporate it into your holiday by jotting a few words whilst sitting in a cafe
47. Using it in a location en route goes to help cross the bridge of time in years to come
48. Let the coffee cup ring marks add to the story
49. Give one to a colleague going on long service leave
50. Are you one of those people who has every intention of starting a journal, but…. it doesn’t quite happen?
51. Don’t be bound by the traditional starting on page 1 on day 1
52. With a Map Journal spontaneity and randomness rules
53. Fishing trips – Enter a catch per box and give a tantalizing hint as to ‘where’ it was caught on the map LOL
54. See if you can find the 27 native Australian animals that are illustrated both on the map and decorate the surrounding boxes and tick them off on this free Download that comes in list form for older children (or those who want the greater challenge) 
55. Give it to a child on a long journey and see if they can find the 27 different Australian animals that are illustrated on this free download where they can see illustrations of what they are looking for (9 animals on each sheet) 
56. Bet you can’t find the duck billed platypus 😀
57. Record your bird watching escapades ~ perfect for the Twitchers in the family
58. Moving house ~ show the spacial relationship of where you were living and where you are now living (particularly impressive if moving interstate)
59. Give it to a Grey Nomad heading north for the winter
60. Show where you want to go (and then see later if they match up)
61. Record anecdotal experiences in the boxes ~ Not a novel – just a few pertinent hilarities and memorable moments
62. Map Journals are not only a great visual keepsake, they’re also a tactile complement to an on-line blog, which lets face it can only ever be ‘virtual’ and will certainly never be able to say it was there with you, at the time, in the flesh, held in your hot hand when standing miles from home looking out on that next horizon 🙂
63. In this world of virtual realities come home with some tangible memories
64. Record your fitness countdown to running a marathon 10 weeks, 9 weeks, 8…
65. Annual scuba dive record
66. Daunted by the blank white pages of a yet-to-be-started journal… Map Journal illustrated boxes give you a head start to sporadically jot thoughts about your trip either here… or over there
67. A picture tells a 1000 words so maybe the odd doodle wouldn’t go astray
68. Take a Map Journal on honeymoon, where the memories are essential, but somehow there are other priorities to spending time writing in a thick, fat traditional journal 😉
69. Sure, start at the beginning if you’re the organized type
70. But it works equally well starting in the middle, when the beginning isn’t too far behind and the pleasure of what is to come still lays ahead 😉
71. Then if you discover it still unused at the bottom of your bag when you get home, unlike a traditional journal, a Map Journal is still good to go for selectively collating the most impressionable memories for posterity
72. Anyone going, going and doesn’t want the memories gone
73. Ensures those memorable moments remain forever memorable
74. New baby’s first year – recording developments month by month
75. Birthday Journal – from Baby to 10 years old – one box per year for a hand print and a ‘mark’ on their special day (without it resembling a corny ‘Baby Book’ dragged out for display at the 21st ;(
76. Child off to visit interstate rellies for Christmas
77. Teenage journal ~ from 11 to 20 (a box a year to illustrate a decade)
78. Decade journal – One highlight per year recorded on your birthday over any 10 years
79. Graduating from school ~ “Oh, the places you may go!”
80. Gap year adventures backpacking
81. Forget those pages and pages of woolly fluff ~ Record just enough to jog the ‘ole grey matter
82. Jot down a mere word or two describing what you can see, hear, touch, smell and taste in the air ~ ‘experiences’ are experienced through the senses
83. Recording what you can taste in the atmosphere is one of the most evocative memory recall mechanisms ~ the humidity of the rainforest, the dustiness of the desert and the dryness in your mouth before you take a bungy jump
84. No point buying a full blown journal for a week-end away, when a Map Journal is the best fit
85. Follow grandma’s journey as she travels around Oz, plotting her trip as she checks in with place names on Facebook
86. Gastronomy critic? Use a box per restaurant, with a short review, so you have your top 10 choices encapsulated
87. Diet journal – 10 week programme recording progress from week 1 so you can celebrate in week 10
88. Not all holidaymakers are travel writers but all love reminiscing
89. Take your reminiscing to new horizons
90. Whether going on a weekend break or an annual hollers ~ Map Journals capture the spirit of your adventure
91. Holidays and travelling are full of amazing experiences ~  but that’s only the half of it ~
92. Combining a Map with a Journal is a pretty unique idea for tracking your trails & tales (even though I say it myself!)
93. Unfolding a map of an area previously visited draws you back to places and times past.
94. Letting fingers fall upon familiar place-names memories of valley vistas and towering ranges are brought vividly back to life.
95. When your travelling’s done, relive the fun
96. “To a man of imagination, a map is a window to adventure”. Francis Chichester
97. Most people think of maps as being merely navigational, but the truth is they also evoke nostalgia and flaunt far away places that tempt!
98. Journey Jottings maps exude a feeling that somewhere an ‘X’ marks the spot… But its discovery lies in the hand of the holidaymaker whose adventure is encapsulated in this visual keepsake.
99. Spending time with holiday memories (when that moment for nostalgia strikes), is like taking a marvellous mini-break… IF you can remember them!
100. So after you’ve been back at work a week (in some cases a mere day), and those glorious lazy days are already beginning to alarmingly fade into a hazy distant memory
101. …aren’t you pleased you have your…

Journey Jottings Map Journal
to kick back with 😉

Originally Published 25th November 2010, reproduced here for ease of reference