Travelogues

Reading travelogues are a great research tool for travel planning, and travel inspiration. It's a useful way of reading someones daily experiences with a specific trip if you don't know someone who's already been to a destination. Let's be honest anyway -- most experiences you or your friends find unique has been done a thousands of times by others. So you can usually find entries very similar to the one you are looking into.

When I'm considering using a tour group I like to read travelogues from past participants, to get their feedback, and see how much of the descriptions are marketing BS. For these types of, using websites such as http://www.travelblog.com can help for searching, but one of the more disappointing aspects is that there are a lot of unfinished travelogues, or poorly detailed.

Many of the big tour groups (like contiki, GAP) have forums on their website with either outright links to the travelogues, or message posts with snippets of information. I believe these sites are missing out on a large marketing piece by not hard linking each of their trips with these blogs.

Two captivating sites I visit frequently are
http://www.wherethehellismatt.com
http://www.davechallenger.com

Travel Journals

Keeping a travel journal is one of the best things I've done when it comes to traveling. I can't remember why I started doing it, but immediately after my first trip to Europe I purchased a mole skin book, and kept a day by day record of my travels.

http://www.moleskineus.com/moleskine-books.html

When I go back and read some of my entries, it reminds me of many small experiences that I otherwise would have forgotten. It's also useful to record restaurants, sights, and hostels so if I return, or someone asks for my advice on, I can remember.

It also makes for a great present for anyone about to go on their first trip. I've given to a few people and they all loved the idea.

Of course, now my book is about 2/3 of the way through. I can't wait for it to finish, but I'm also paranoid about losing it, having it get stolen, or wet. I'm all about digital backups and such, and have tried scanning in pages, or typing them out so I could have a backup, but it's easy to get lazy.

I'll later post my process for recording each entry.