A travel diary update

What I learned from Romania to Hungary — and a new technique for keeping track of book ideas on the fly.

If I’m on a trip that’s more than, say, a week, I’ll dedicate an entire pocket-sized notebook to the trip. I’ll fill it with tickets and clippings and scraps (I think some people would call this either a junk journal or a scrapbook). I’ll take notes in it and also draw in it.

Here’s the latest one, which I have been hoarding since APRIL to share more widely, because hello, zero bandwidth. Here’s a few things I learned about myself and my process through this particular notebook.

1. Sometimes, the actual beginning of a thing doesn’t come until later, and that’s okay.

I think I only came up with the cover design for this on like day 5, 6, 7 of a 13-day trip. And then it was just the blue line of the Danube. Over the ensuing few days, I added the green around it, which I liked a lot. And then, I added the start and end dots. And then I went overboard and added the two stupid arrows, which I now regret, but whatever!

At the end of day 3 or so, in Braşov? (Was it Day 3? I can’t remember) I finally found something of interest to my eye…it was Braşov’s coat of arms.