I never travel without my diary.  One should always have something sensational to read on the train.  Oscar Wilde. 

One of my favorite quotes e.ver. about travel and journaling.  Whether you’ve had a travel journal practice for a long time or you’re a newbie, I’ll bet you get a kick out of Mr. Wilde’s sentiments, same as me. 

My own diaries, travel journals, have become special treasures that allow me to remember a trip in ways that looking through photos on my phone simply doesn’t. 

In my journals, I layer in pages torn from travel guides, playbills, even take-out menus.  I’ll jot down descriptions like this one from my trip to Paris last April – “the air smells like butter”. 

Then I remember, it truly did, and I might have forgotten that, had I not opened my journal and written down that thought, that morning.  Suddenly I’m reliving that whole morning more in detail…

It was raining like crazy, but it was my last morning in the Montmartre apartment I rented before I met my tour group that afternoon.  I wanted to run into a shop I’d read about online before leaving the States.  I waited for a break in the rainfall and grabbed my beret (oui!) and raincoat and dashed out the door. 

As I wandered through L’Objet Qui Parle (do you know it?), I had a marvelous visit, mostly in French (!) with the proprietress, who was charming, her boutique full of all sorts of vintage curiosities: plaster cast Madonna statues, long forgotten oil paintings, rusty skeleton keys, piles of antique linens, old puppets that bordered on creepy.  She had stories for many of the pieces- where they came from, how old they were – it was fascinating. 

After about an hour of browsing and chatting, I left with two paper grocery bags full of treasures.  Merveilleux! Thank goodness for the roomy suitcase I brought along on this trip.

As I walked home, now in the pouring rain, I stopped in my tracks to look around for the boulangerie that just had to be right in front of me.  No patisserie or boulangerie in sight, I said aloud to the empty street, “the air smells like butter”.  I shook my head and took up my walk again, thinking, “oh Paris, you are a wonder.” 

All this remembered in vivid detail, now months later, simply because I wrote down, “the air smells like butter”. 

Sensational, indeed.

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