TripHip - Travel Tips and Advice for Traveling on a Budget

When you go on a trip, there's a good chance that you'll pick up some souvenirs or even some new clothes. Therefore it's often a good idea to pack some clothes that you wouldn't mind parting with, to make room for all your cool new stuff!

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.

With old-fashioned cameras, taking photos of a trip could be nerve-wracking and very expensive. You took a lot of photos...but will they turn out? Sadly, a lot of them didn't -- darn that thumb over the lenscap! -- nevertheless you had to pay to have them developed, anyway.

The digital camera reduces the cost of photographs tremendously. Now, you need pay only for the photos you print out yourself, and you choose which ones to print. If half of them don't turn out, you don't have to print them. Just delete them.

Don't become carried away with such freedom, however. If you take 300 photos, remember you're still going to have to download and print them, and 300 photos can be a bit daunting. Take quality photos, not just a lot of photos simply because you can!

In addition, make sure you label each one as soon as you download it from your computer, so that at the end of your trip (assuming you have a laptop) you will remember what's what!

If you're not going to be able to see your photos on a computer screen until you return home, spend an hour or so each night making notes of the places you visited and the photos you took, so you'll have something to jar your memory when you return home.

Many tourists and travellers these days don't bother with post cards, because with the ease and convenience of digital cameras, who needs 'em?

Well...people with lousy memories do!

One of the problems with digital cameras is that people can take so many photos, so easily, that they quite often get carried away. Then, when they get home and are faced with the task of putting those photos into some kind of order, and labeling them and so on...they see all those photos and get discouraged. They put off the task, and put it off, until a year later they look at the photos, ready to begin the project, only to find they can't remember the names of the locations!

Purchasing post cards prevents this little problem, because the postcards are invariably labeled with the location. More than that, many of the postcards give information on the reverse side, about the photograph onthe cover side.

It's fun to collect postcards, actually. There's a variety of designs, from those that have a photo or drawing on the front and nothing on the back, so that people can write addresses and notes easiliy, to more sophisticated ones that give you two photos, a normal one on the front, and a faded photo of a different view of the same scene, on the back.

Some locations also have post-marks to put on the postcard...as for example the Pony Express station/museum in Gothenburg, Nebraska.

There's all sorts of postcard collectors, too. I prefer pristine ones. Some people mail the postcards to themselves, or collect them from friends and family to whom they've mailed them.

So when you visit a museum or other location, don't forget the postcards

If you're travelling within the United States, it's not really necessary to worry about overloading your luggage with all the souvenirs you pick up on your travels, or even an excess of clothing.

Mail your souvenirs back to yourself - packed appropriately, of course. And if you're tired of lugging all your clothes around - mail that back as well!

The cost of postage is usually not that bad, considering the ease and comfort and peace of mind you'll receive by not having to worry about carting everything around with you.

Just make sure you pack fragile items carefully. The post office does not keep all packages right side up, and a Fragile sticker really doesn't mean anything. If you want a seashell or a statuette to arrive safely, pack it in bubble wrap, nestle it in peanuts, and use a sturdy box to ensure safe delivery.

In many parts of the world, a customer is expected to haggle over the price of every purchase. This is very common in traditional open-air style markets, as opposed to Western-style shopping malls.

Haggling isn't just a way to get a bargain, it's necessary to simply get a reasonable price. Vendors will usually suggest a price far higher than the going rate for something, even as much as 3 or 4 times too high. They're not really trying to cheat you, that's just the way things work in some countries. It's a game you need to play.

So take some time, chat with the vendors and have a friendly debate about prices before you buy even the smallest souvenir.

I'm interested in many facets of American history, from the Revolutionary War and Civil Wars, to early aviation sites, to the famous WPA post office murals.

Most of my souvenirs are the photographs I take, of course. Now that I have a digital camera I can take photos of practically anything without fear of wasting money - street signs, interestig designs on manhole covers, posters in bus stations, as well as interiors and exteriors of buildings, and re-enactors, or street entertainers.

However, that's not enough! I, and I expect a lot of other people, like to have physical souvenirs as well. But more than souvenirs, I like to have a collection.

On a recent driving trip, I traversed nine states, so I picked up nine magnets in the shape of states, from one of the tourist traps I stopped in along the way.

Most museums have gift shops, and usually these shops will sell souvenirs of the museum itself - a picture of the museum on a kitchen magnet, or on a patch, or on a postcard. I like to pick these up as well.

On several of my trips, I've come across penny machines. You insert a penny into one slot, and two quarters into two other slots, and then you crank a wheel until your flattened penny drops into a little container, imprinted with a design from the museum.

I always liked the idea of that, but I never indulged myself because I didn't really have any place to display them. That all changed when I stopped in at the Dinosaur Museum in Thermopois, and saw the Penny Passport, a souvenir penny collecting book.

And then the penny dropped. (That's an attempt at a pun.) I bought the passport, and spent two dollars and four cents on the four designs that the dinosaur museum offered, and my penny collecting career was born.

Of course it's not necessary to buy the penny collecting book, as I realized immediately. A stock book that holds stamps would work also. However, I always like to buy "Official" collecting supplies, and so I did.

And so can you.

If you're interested in collecting "flat," "pressed" or "elongated" pennies, by the way, there's a website that tells you what locations in each state has such machines:

http://www.pennycollector.com/AreaList.aspx
This list includes all United States, and international locations as well.

Photographs are without a doubt some of the best souvenirs you can have of any vacation. But you can capture memories by saving other items on your trip, too. Ticket stubs, napkins, matchbooks and receipts are all simple things you can tuck away to bring home. Photos are great, but these extra souvenirs can bring back more memories because they are actually things you used and touched during your trip. They make for great scrapbooking material, too.