Everyone brings back something from their travels, whether that is simply memories and photographs, or something more. During our early days of traveling, which was all within the United States, we used to collect coffee mugs from everyplace we visited. We even bought special coffee mug racks to display all of our mugs with colorful pictures depicting what is unique about each location. While they were fun to look at, it very quickly became too much to display as the number of coffee mugs grew year after year. Since those days, we have gone with a different approach for finding things that we want to bring home with us to remind us of the places that we’ve visited.
Walk through any tourist shop and you will find many of the common things that people collect during their travels. Keychains, refrigerator magnets, shot glasses, coffee mugs, snow-globes, and pens are all among the items that you can usually find in almost any city around the world. Although we used to collect some of those items, now we try to find things that are more unique and often hand-made by local artisans. We love to get inexpensive paintings or small works of art from the different places that we’ve visited. When we buy a painting, we will purchase unframed so that it can be rolled up and protected during our flight back home. We keep them on display and can fondly remember where we found each of the individual items. Some items are very indicative of the city or country, others we simply found intriguing and we still make a connection to the country where we found it.
In addition to bringing back pieces of art or other unique items, we also bring back money from the places that we visit as well as tourist maps. It is our intention to one day make a collage out of all of the unique tourists maps that proudly display the top tourist attractions within the city. We also intend to someday display that currency that we’ve collected throughout our travels. And even though we purchase them prior to visiting different locations, we also collect the travel books that we use to plan our trips. Perhaps we’re a little weird, but we have a lot of travel items that we’ve collected on display throughout our home. We also have digital frames that rotate through photographs from our travels as well. Is there anything that you collect during your journeys and do you display them for others to see?
Keeping your personal items secure when traveling is always important as tourists are often the target of thieves. The TRAVELON bags that we have used have slash-resistent straps and locking features to keep pick-pockets from being able to do a “grab and go”. The purse and backpack that we used also have RFID protected internal sleeves to protect our credit cards. They also offer a wide variety of RFID protected wallets as well. The laptop back that we use has plenty of room for all of our electronics and even a place to hold a water bottle, which we have found extremely convenient.
