How do you make your travel experiences last forever? As you get back into your daily life it is natural for those memories to slowly fade away, but I have some tricks to help keep your memories alive.
The first way to capture memories is an obvious one…take loads of photos. Taking pictures is as easy as ever now that our smart phones are always in our back pocket and we don’t have to cart around film containers (am I making myself sound old?) Don’t feel embarrassed for holding up the group or looking like an idiot to capture that perfect shot. 
In the end our photos are our treasures and they truly do capture a moment like nothing else. There’s a quote I recently read that says ‘we take photos as a return ticket to a moment otherwise gone’. I used to be an avid ‘scrapbooker’…well avid might be a strong word…but I did take the time to print all my photos out and place them in a book with pretty paper. Although some may be crafty and still like doing this, I have found a much more cost and time effective way to store and display my photos when I get home. Creating a photo book through an online provider is pretty easy. First you download the program to your computer (some computers might already have them installed), then you upload the photos that you want to include in your lovely finished book, next you can either let the program arrange the photos for you or you can drag them in whatever order you’d like (I add text to my book), and lastly once finished, you order your book and voila…it comes to your doorstep. Boom, just like that you have a beautiful bound book that looks like you bought it from the bookstore down the road. I use Picaboo, but I know that there are many sites out there with similar functions.
Another way to make your travel memories last is to take advantage of your olfactory system. Do you ever wonder why when you smell coconut oil, it reminds you of when you were at the beach?
Or perhaps the smell of fresh cut grass reminds you of when you were a kid playing in the back yard. I tend to bring scented lotion that I use while I am away. The minute I am at home and use that scent again, I have a sense of when I was back on my holidays.
This trick is one of my favorites… when I am away I keep an ear out for a few songs that play during the course of that trip. Once you are aware of that song (it could be a golden oldie, or a song you’ve never heard before) make sure to make note of it and download it as soon 
as you get home. Every time one of my songs that I downloaded from past trips shuffles through my play list I can literally picture exactly where I was and what I was looking at during those moments.
And lastly I think that keeping in touch with the people you meet along your travels is the most important way of keeping your travels alive. It is so simple to keep in touch with people on the other side of the world these days. With a click of a button we can video chat around the world. Keep these relationships alive. They are a unique and treasured gift. One day you never know when you will be in the same place at the same time and can relive all your amazing memories together!
The Urban Wanderer 