TripHip - Travel Tips and Advice for Traveling on a Budget

Many people pick up souvenirs on the road, which they toss into the trunk of their car or their suitcase, and when they get home, they toss it into the back of the closet...never to be seen again.

It's a pity, because properly organized, all those items - magazines denoting things to see, tourist maps, brochures, and so on - are all valuable aides to memories...more so even than the photographs you take.

But if you don't store htem properly, all those potential memories are lost.

Whenever I visit a new city, I always buy a local newspaper, just to have a snapshot memory of what was going on in the city while I was there. These are bulky, and you need to have a lot of storage space. I keep them in a large plastic storage box, out of the way of the sun, and when I'm in a contemplative mood, I go through them.

I also pick up a lot of brochures at tourist information centers. Even if I don't have the time to visit a third of the locations, I pick up the brochures anyway, just in case I'm ever to mount a return trip, or just when I'm in a melancholy mood, to view what I've missed!

I store these brochures by topic in white, 8 X 10 envelopes, divided by state or by topic, as my whimsy takes me. For example, I'm in to dinosaurs, so I've got dozens of these envelopes filled with brochures on museums and other locations devoted to those terrible lizards. I also have individual envelopes for towns, such as Cheyenne, Wyoming, or Deadwood, South Dakota.

Rather than collect all this material, jumble it all together, and try to sort it when I get home, I do my sorting on the road. I carry the envelopes with me, or if I've been careless and forgotten them, I always ask the tourist office if they have a bag I can use. Typically these are embossed with the name of the tourist center, or if not that, advertising from the nearby town. So with my brochures in these bags, I keep them all together and I know where I acquired them.

Once I get home, everything goes into filing cabinets, extensively labeled. After all, it doesn't matter how much memorabilia you have, if you can't find it.