Road Trip Prep - Kai's Travel Journal

At the first of April, I'm going back to California to take a road trip with Court and her girls. I'd made the girls binders for this trip, which you can read about here. But in my last week in Abu Dhabi, I was focussing on a second, computer-based project. I wanted to make a journal / activity book for Kai.

I've always kept a travel journal. I started with spiral bound notebooks and bound journals, but none of those stuck around. After law school, I found that I loved using notebook sized legal pads - special bonus if they were punched for a three ring binder. (Most of the pages are tucked into the back of photo albums from those early trips, or stashed in file folders in a box of memories from childhood.) I've kept journals in computer files and you could say I keep a travel journal here.

But two years ago, I decided I wanted to try something else. I kept seeing bullet journals on Pinterest, but I don't have the patience or handwriting to create the spreads I really enjoyed. But I did have a new set of Illustrator skills, thanks to my fashion classes. I'm on my second binder system (proving that I really cannot settle on a single thing), but I've kept many of my original pages. And I still love using Illustrator to create and print my pages. I wanted to create something like this for Kai.

My journal begins with a page where I record my travels for the year. I write the date of the trip and color in the state. I decided to make a more generic map for Kai, so that she could track all her trips in one place.

Every trip in my book begins with a page that describes the trip. Kai's would be no different. I always include a route map - this one shows her house, my house, and our eventual destination. At the top, I list where I am going, who is going along with me and where I will be staying. I changed the labels on hers and added a "how I will get there" field. Like I do on my own, I filled in a few things when I made the page.

In my book, I have pages that I can fill out for each day. I made two simplified versions for Kai. The first has space to draw about her day. The second has lines so she can write about what she did that day. Both have spots to show the weather, write about her favorite thing about the day, write something that she wants to tell her dad about the day, and write something she learned that day.

I remember reading road maps on trips when I was a kid. So I put together a page with an old-style road map with places to make notes.

Since we are on a road trip, I thought it might also be fun for her to think about other trips that she might like to make. In my journal, I have a version of this page where I can write notes about future trips, before I make my final journal page. This is basically a blank version of her intro page.

In my journal, I keep track of the books that I've read. I made a slightly larger version for Kai, to accommodate her larger handwriting.

Finishing out the bullet journal aspect of her journal, I made her a habit tracking page (using a list of "habits" that her mother provided).