Awesome Road Trip Travel Scrapbook Ideas!

Bullet journalling, scrapbooking, in the middle of the digital age it’s kinda cool how more people than ever are expressing their creative flair through arts and crafts! Places like Hobby Lobby are dangerous for the artistic type! I may not be a pro scrapbooker but I’m ridiculously proud of my road trip travel scrapbook! In this post I’ll be showing you some of the things I included and why a road trip makes an awesome theme for a scrapbook!

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Travel Scrapbook Ideas

Starting a Travel Scrapbook

I think a huge part of scrapbooking starts right at the very beginning, finding the right book for the topic. When documenting a road trip, I found the scrapbook that inspired me the most was a long landscape sketchbook.

Because the pages were long and skinny, the blank space wasn’t as overwhelming as what a standard paper size would have been. It felt manageable! It also works GREAT for a road trip…you’ll find out why further in the post!

Other scrapbooking tools include:

• Fine Line Markers – Not a crazy amount, a 10 pack is fine. I prefer to work in pencil but it’s nice to have some pen choices in various colours for the headings and to make certain parts of the page stand out!
• 100 colored pencils – Yes! 100! When it comes to colouring something in, I like to have a wide range of different colours and shades to pick from!
• Photo corners – I love these things. They are helpful for holding things in place that you may not want permanently stuck down!
• Extra strength glue stick – I find that regular glue sticks often don’t hold things well enough…it tends to dry and then things start to fall out. Extra strength glue sticks hold things a little bit better!
• Travel themed stickers – not necessarily hundreds of stickers, just a few here and there to  help fill up little spaces!

Road Trip Scrapbook Ideas

🚙The Road | 📷Drawings/Photos | 💳Items to Collect | 📈Ratings | ☀️Weather

The Road/Route!

The number one thing to include in a road trip scrapbook, is the road! This is where the narrow scrapbook comes in handy! It’s such a simple thing to fill a page with, draw a section of the road and label some of the landmark towns that you passed through.

As I was doing Route 66 and my start and finish points were Chicago and LA (big cities!), I used a couple of pages for each of these as we had spent a couple of nights in each place and therefore saw a lot of the main attractions!

For the main part of the journey, depending on how much you want to draw, you could break down the road into the days travelled. This is kinda what I did. That way I also included:

• The day of the trip
• The start and finish point
• The amount of miles covered
• You could also include how long the journey took from A to B
• State lines crossed (including time zone changes!)
• Quick facts and information about places

…using my travel scrapbook a little like a journal too!  This information and then the outline of the road, I used coloured pens, as I felt these were information things to highlight!

Drawings or Photos

Around the road I then drew little pictures of things I saw along the route, anything from road signs to unique roadside attractions. Being on Route 66, there were plenty of quite simple but effective things to draw, such as the ‘Here It Is’ jack rabbit road sign, wigwams and blue whales!

During one stretch of the journey, there were a whole heap of Burma Shave road signs. This turned into a little game during the road trip, whenever we saw one, we’d shout it out and one of us would quickly write them down!

So one page has a load of my favourite Burma Shave poems drawn in their little red road signs!

I chose to draw landmarks but you could use photos if it’s easier!

Items to Collect

It wouldn’t be a travel scrapbook if I didn’t include mementos from the trip!

I collected:

• Leaflets from different attractions
• Business cards
• Tickets
• Receipts
• Hotel key cards
• Postcards
• I even kept a tiny little Texas toothpick flag that was on top of my burger at the Big Texan steak restaurant!

Most of these I stuck in with photo corners, so if I wanted to look back at a leaflet, I could easily remove it and still read it.  Pockets are often popular for storing items like these in a scrapbook!

When I went back and looked at my travel scrapbook a while after I had made it, I noticed that some of the receipts had faded so much, they were just blank pieces of white paper. Because I hadn’t stuck them in with glue, I was able to remove the faded ones and stick or draw something else in its place without completely ruining the page!

*Tip* I made sure I spread things like these out across the page, throughout the book, that way one end wouldn’t be really bulky, it still laid fairly flat, even when filled with the additional items!  I use a piece of ribbon to tie my scrapbook shut though.

I kinda knew before the trip that I wanted to make some form of a scrapbook or cool album for the trip, so I already had some scrapbook ideas. While I was on the road, I looked for souvenirs that could be used for it once I returned home.  

I picked up several sticker packs from gift shops along the Route, things like State Route 66 shields. Very simple, cheap souvenirs that are great for adding another personal touch to a scrapbook.

Remember the days when you actually got photos printed? Well I tend to use printed photo books now which are like printed, digitally made scrapbooks (I always include little text boxes with information about the photos etc).

But when I had my Route 66 photos printed in 6×4 size, in each envelope there was a thumbnail sheet of all the pictures that were in that particular envelope. Rather than waste the thumbnails (the larger photos went in a proper album), I cut out the good ones and then stuck them along the ‘drawn route’ in the rough location that they were taken!

In a bigger scrapbook, regular sized photos are a popular option.

Accommodation Ratings

I finished my scrapbook with a table rating all the hotels we stayed at during the trip! I rated them on things like: facilities, cleanliness (not going to lie, one place had dirty underwear hanging up in the shower…), value for money etc.  

It was just a fun little way of me remembering the places where I stayed! Obviously this works well with something like a road trip if you are on a route with multiple stops!

Weather

When I was younger, I always used to document the weather we had while travelling! I just used to draw a simple picture, such as a sun, a cloud, rain drops.

Now phones have weather apps, you could quite easily make a note of the temperatures too! It may not seem like much at the time, but in 10 years time you aren’t necessarily going to remember how hot or cold things were!

I got inspiration for my road trip scrapbook from the EZ66 guide book that we used during our road trip!  If you’re not great at drawing Route 66 Splendor is a great travel themed adult coloring book that is well worth checking out if you still want something to express your creativity!

What are some of the ways that you document your travels?! I ALWAYS keep a journal (even if they never materialise into a scrapbook) and I’m really thankful that I have the memories recorded! Definitely helps when it comes to remembering the small stuff!!

Inspired to make your own travel scrapbook with these scrapbook ideas? Pin it for later!

Last Updated on March 28, 2024