Preserving Camping Memories

Our first camping trip of the season this year was on Mother’s Day weekend. We decided, kinda on the spur of the moment, to go to Yakima (about 3.5 hours away) and connect with our niece and her family who live over there.

Yakima is in the high desert part of Washington State, known for its orchards and wineries, but not so much for its camping opportunities. However, they do have a small state park with a campground so we stayed there. It was a lovely weekend weather-wise and we enjoyed visiting with our relatives.

Each time we go camping we have a great time, which is why we keep doing it. However, looking back, it’s sometimes hard to differentiate between the memories of one camping trip with another. For that reason, we keep a camping log in our trailer.

This is a tradition started by Lyle’s parents clear back in 1961, before he was even born. They maintained it for 48 years with the last entry being in 2009. I’m so glad Lyle thought to ask his dad for a copy of it a few years ago before his dad died.

We started journaling our camping trips in 2006 when we bought our first travel trailer. For several years we just used a blank journal. In 2017 when we got our current trailer I designed a fill-in-the-blank camping journal.

Recently I was brainstorming ideas to use up surplus paper from the print shop by printing items I thought people might be interested in buying at community events this summer. We’ve done packages of blank paper, notepads, and blank lined journals in the past. This year I decided to add camping journals since camping is pretty popular in our area.

I designed 3 different covers on different colors of paper.

The inside pages are all the same, with a fill-in-the-blank page on the right and blank lines on the left of each two-page spread.

Last weekend we participated in a local one-day festival promoting the new “downtown” area the city of Post Falls hopes to develop. I could just tell you that we sold camping journals there, since that’s the point of this post but it was such a fun event I can’t resist sharing more about it!

There is a new one-block street near City Hall that has sidewalks and landscaping but no buildings yet. The city set up the cutest little faux storefronts all along the block, with room behind it for vendors to set up 10′ square awnings.

Here’s the view from behind before we put the walls on the awning. We had tentatively planned to leave it open, but as it was drizzling rain we decided it would be better to be enclosed.

Here’s the inside of my little store-for-a-day once we got it set up…

And the street view…

The event started at 10:00 and it was raining. Fortunately, the rain tapered off by noon so we had a better turnout than I had hoped.

And yes, we sold several camping journals along with other paper items. We’ve got a couple other community events coming up later this summer so I may even add other types of journals to our inventory.

I think journaling, no matter how you do it, is so important for preserving our memories.

Throw-Back Posts You Might Also Enjoy:

From May 2018: How to Create a Travel Notebook

From June 2017: How to Plan Your First Camping Trip

From June 2017: Camping With Kids

From December 2016: December D’lights Festival

From November 2016: In Which We Participate in Trunk-or-Treat

From May 2011: Housekeeping in the Woods

From May 2009: In Which We Go Camping for Mother’s Day (10 years ago!)

From May 2006: In Which We Buy Our First Travel Trailer