I have officially shared all of my European travel destinations. I'm all out of photos and stories until the day that we go back there on vacation. I hope that the day comes sooner rather than later and it's not too long of a wait.
What I'm going to share now is the homemade travel pinmap that we made while living in France.
It was a fun way to keep track of all of the destinations that we visited and made for a cheap but somewhat interesting artwork to put up on our walls.
We bought an old timey looking map of France online along with some black pins and put it in a cheap wooden frame that we bought at the store with some thin cork board behind it.
Then we put a pin in every city and town that we visited to keep track of all of the places we have been to. As you can see from the map, and my blog if you scroll through it, we visited a lot of places in France over the three years that we lived there. There are a few red pins in there as well. Those represent places that only one of us visited, either myself or my wife. There aren't many places that we didn't go together but she did travel to a few places for work and I had gone on a couple of trips with friends while we lived there.
When we started branching out from France and visiting other countries we found some more old looking maps online and printed them off ourselves and did the same thing on a smaller scale.
The maps are quite old so they aren't actually 100% accurate, but they did have all of the cities and towns that we travelled to, so they worked for the our purpose.
The map of Germany was probably the most outdated because it was a map of old Prussia. Nonetheless, it does the trick.
We printed off maps of Germany, Switzerland, a combined map of Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg and finally a map of the UK.
The UK was slightly disappointing since we never got a chance to officially travel there, other than my wife visiting two locations for work. We kept the map as motivation to go in the future.
At the time they made for some decent artwork for our bare walls in France and now they are a neat sort of souvenir to remember our time in Europe.
We never printed out maps for Austria or Portugal so we may still do that at some point if we decide to hang them up permanently at our current house.
They were hung up on the walls in the basement for a little while but got taken down when we moved things around for our house renovation. They are currently sitting on our fireplace mantel in the basement, waiting for a more permanent location on the walls.
Do you do anything to keep track of where you have traveled to? Let me know in the comments.
Using old maps is actually a nice touch, blending the old with current. And the UK one.... tut tut tut 😔 need to do something about that!!!
Worldmappin is currently the only place I keep track of where I've been. Hubs has been building an image server recently and shows all the image locations on a map, once done that would be cool. But sadly it won't work for the old photos
Yeah we really need to go for sure. The trouble is that the exchange kills us. The Canadian dollar is so weak compared to any other currency, especially the Pound and Euro 😕. So that reason alone, we are more likely to choose other spots that won't break the bank lol. We will get there eventually though.
The image server sounds like a cool idea!
I like the old maps way of doing it. Remember when you do visit the Uk that there is much in the north! :OD
We would love to see the highlands. At one point I was getting so many reel and videos of destinations in Scotland. It was incredible. I was like, why didn't I know about these places!?! It's definitely on the list.
Hehe, there are a lot of amazing places that have a lot of Instagram and YouTube posts floating about. If you go in summer you are laughing. If you take a van and camp wild even more so!
Okay that's good to know. It helps knowing the ideal season for a location. I know that sunshine can be limited in the UK lol, but I won't let that stop me
This is an excellent idea, love the realization too, with those black pins and old maps. I hope the UK will be also filled with many pins one day, and as you as rather sooner than later haha.
Yeah the old maps are neat. It can be hard to find the same consistent maps though. That was a challenge. We still have to do Spain as well. I've only been to Barcelona and one other small town that I forget the name of. There is so much more I have yet to see!
Greetings @leaky20 ,
What a lovely idea and such a splendid project that the two of you enjoy...such a plus plus.
We actually have only accomplished half of what you two have done and that is collect antique maps of countries we have been to and framed them.
Enjoyed reading your post. ^__^
Kind Regards to you and your good lady,
Bleujay
Well thats a start! It can be a slow process to see all the location one wants to see. There are too many. We were lucky to live in France for a few years. That helped us. Otherwise we would never have been able to travel as much as we did.