When AJ and I embarked on our mother-daughter trip to New York and California a few years ago I was determined to make every minute of the trip special. I knew it would be a once-in-a-lifetime trip. As I see the effects of coronavirus on travel I’m so glad we seized the moment and didn’t wait. Given AJ was a teenager I wanted her to feel involved in every part of the trip from itinerary planning to capturing the memories. I bought a HP Sprocket portable printer for the trip and it was a lovely way to ensure each day’s highlights were celebrated. Given we can’t travel at the moment, there’s no better time to focus on past travels and make sure those travel memories are kept safe and can be looked back on in a fun way.
FUN WAYS TO KEEP TRAVEL MEMORIES – HP SPROCKET PORTABLE PRINTER
Although we travel with more camera equipment than your usual family, we still rely heavily on our iPhones. Let’s face it, with the rise of social media sharing, there has been a heavy focus on the quality of the images phones take. Sadly though, I think many photos just stay on phones and in the cloud. The days of printing photos and popping them in a photo album are all but over. BJ is obsessed by photos so we still print some for him to keep in small albums and we often make photo books using services like Snapfish.
For our trip to the US I bought a HP Sprocket portable printer because it sounded fun and something AJ and I could do together. The printer connects to your phone and allows you to print polaroid-style sticker backed photos while on-the-go. Each day we’d get back to the hotel after a big day out, kick off our shoes, grab some snacks and lie on the bed looking back over our day’s photos savouring the moments. There was always lots of giggling and chatting while we’d print out the pictures we thought best encapsulated the atmosphere of that day.
What we did was a bit like scrapbooking but in my mind it was the lazy person’s version. While in New York we searched for an appropriately themed book to keep our travel memories. We finally found one at the New York Transit Museum at Grand Central Terminal. It’s actually my hot tip for a fantastic spot to buy less touristy keepsakes of New York. I bought many gifts from this shop, including my own favourite mug I sip my tea from every day.
In our travels around the city we collected a range of postcards and vintage stickers which reflected our experiences. We also kept our ticket stubs, metro cards, tickets to shows and anything else we thought would be good keepsakes in the book.
While waiting for flights, and in the evenings, we’d choose photos and print them out. Our travels however were so busy and exhausting we didn’t have time to put them together in the book with the other items we’d collected while we were travelling. We ended up spending time on another, quieter, mother-daughter trip collating it all into a book of memories. As you can see from the top photo, it took a lot of organising because we’d collected so much in our travels.
Life moves so quickly these days (except when in lockdown of course!) we often forget to stop and savour the moments of our travels. It’s easy to finish one trip and start to dream of another. Much happiness can be captured, saved and enjoyed by spending time remembering the good times. Travelling together and the shared memories has certainly bonded AJ and I.
The HP Sprocket portable printer may be a novelty but it’s fun and ideal for teenagers or young adults. Like other instant cameras, the film refills are not cheap. We stocked up on a great deal we found at a Staples store in New York which kept us going for a long time. If you are only using the sprocket to print out special memories for a project, I think it’s worth the cost. The HP Sprocket printer is rechargeable using a USB connection so it’s great for travel.
Even as I was taking the photos of our project to share in this blog, I had a wonderful time reliving the memories of our travels with AJ. It immediately had us saying things like, “Do you remember when……” “That was such a fun day” and so on. Photos have a way of transporting us back in time and reminding us of the tiny detail of an experience. Often they are the details that fade in our own memories over time.
We added a video to the Have Wheelchair Will Travel TikTok of BJ printing out some of his favourite travel snaps with the HP Sprocket. You can see it here.
We purchased the HP Sprocket ourselves and this is not a sponsored post. I thought sharing our experience may provide an idea of how you can save your travel memories, or it could be a good gift idea for that hard-to-buy for person.
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