A (Psudeo) Travel Journal in May

click image to enlarge

I've not done much traveling in my life. When I was a kid I always thought I would love to travel. I had then, and still have now, an urge to travel to far away exotic places. This coincides with my long held fascination with ancient history and archaeology. 

While my few travel experiences were generally good, (Florida, New Orleans, Belgium, Hawaii), I find travel stressful. I don't like surprises, but I  love a well planned itinerary.  I'm not one to simply wander about.  None of that really matters though, since circumstances in my life, that realistically are not going to change, will prevent me from doing much traveling anyway. 

In Julia Cameron's book Vein of Gold she encourages you to make a list of occupations you would like to have and things you would like to do but probably will never be able to. Then she challenges you to find way to incorporate some small part of that into your life.

click image to enlarge

This is me doing some of that.  I really admire people's travel journals. And I really admire people who travel a lot, with ease.  Instead of never having a travel journal from an exotic place I decided to do something about that in a small, fun way.  This has become my project for May.  I actually started a few days ago, overlapping with IFJM so that I wouldn't break my creative stride and lose momentum. 

I purchased a video course called Great Tours: Greece and Turkey, from Athens to Istanbul. This would be something you'd watch beforehand if you were planning to travel to those places, or if you're an arm chair traveler, like me!

I watch, pause the video, sketch, and continue watching, Sometimes I watch and pick out places I'd like to sketch, jot down where they are in the video, then re-wind and sketch after watching the whole segment.

click image to enlarge

It's not like being there, but it is its own unique experience nonetheless.