Carnet de Voyage: Creating a Vintage Travel Journal in Paris

I packed a simple travel art kit and imagined myself returning to Paris after nearly forty years away.

It was a trip I had dreamed about for decades.

As I zipped closed a pouch filled with glue sticks, watercolor paints, pens, pencils, and brushes, I felt a mixture of excitement and nervous anticipation.

The last time I had been in Paris, I was a young woman in college.

Now, returning all those years later, I had just turned sixty.

Would the city I had held so close to my heart still feel the same?
Would it still carry the wonder and magic I remembered?

Any lingering questions vanished the moment the airplane wheels left the ground.

I was going back to Paris.

Allons-y.

For months before the trip, I had imagined my first morning there — meeting the host of my Montmartre apartment, dropping off my bags, and heading straight to a café for strong espresso and a warm croissant.

As I dreamed about the journey, I also began imagining the carnet de voyage, the travel journal I would create to record my return to the city.

I have kept journals on my travels for many years, often repurposing old books and filling their pages with the small artifacts of a place — menus, metro tickets, museum guides, and tiny treasures collected along the way.

Preparing the journal before a trip usually heightens the anticipation of the journey.

But for this return to Paris, I decided to do something different.

I would create the entire journal there.

My first day in the city began at the Marché aux Puces de Vanves, one of my favorite flea markets in Paris, followed by a visit to the Marché du Livre Ancien et d’Occasion in Parc Georges Brassens — a paradise of old and secondhand books.

There I found exactly what I was hoping for: an old book to become the cover of my journal, along with beautiful pieces of French ephemera — postcards, handwritten letters, calligraphed documents, lace, button cards, and other paper treasures.

Returning to my apartment high on Butte Montmartre, my arms full of books and papers, I added a few essentials for the evening: a bottle of wine, a wedge of Camembert, a jar of pâté, and a basket of strawberries.

Then I settled in to begin.

By the end of the evening, one of the books had been carefully taken apart and rebuilt as the beginnings of my travel journal. I cut pages to fit inside the cover and began recording the adventures of my first day wandering the flea markets of Paris.

Knowing I would spend most of my days exploring the city on foot, I created a journal small enough to carry everywhere — tucked into my bag alongside a tiny watercolor kit, travel brushes, a pen, glue stick, ruler, and miniature scissors.

This way I could sit anywhere — at a café table, on a museum bench, or on the steps below Sacré-Cœur — and capture a moment before it slipped away.

Over the course of ten days, the journal grew thicker and fuller.

Metro tickets.
Café receipts.
Photos printed each evening with my pocket printer.
A feather picked up near the Eiffel Tower.
A bookmark from Shakespeare and Company.

Each small item layered into the pages helped preserve the story of my reunion with a city I have always loved.

When I finally returned home, the journal had become something far more than a travel diary.

It had become an archive of the journey.

And the wonderful thing about opening it now is that the memories return instantly — the sounds, the tastes, the long walks through Paris neighborhoods, the quiet moments spent noticing the city around me.

As it turns out, Paris had not changed very much in the forty years since my first visit.

And in many ways, neither had I.

Yes, there were modern conveniences now — and perhaps a few more gray hairs and laugh lines.

But at her soul, Paris was still the City of Light I remembered so fondly.

And she welcomed me back as if we had never been apart.

This essay originally appeared online at France Today Magazine.  You can read the original article here.