I wasn’t going to bother with this post because I stuck a picture of my diary/scrapbook/journal at the beginning of every diary entry but this thing is my baby and I want to share it.
I find that if I don’t have things to look back at, I forget things. There are huge swathes of my year abroad that I don’t remember because I don’t have pictures and there are things I don’t really remember because I don’t have blogs. Part of the reason I write this blog is for my own memories. I have another blog that I try to write on the road, partly so my mum knows I’m not dead (seriously, she thinks I’m dead if she can’t see me) and partly so I can look back at it myself and partly because it’s a really useful resource for writing this blog.
When I was unemployed in 2016, I tried out scrapbooking – I have a big fat 12×12 scrapbook packed full of pages of my various trips. They’re all out of order but that’s part of the charm of that particular book. Last year, when I went to Latvia, I made a scrapbook as evidence for my Voyage Award Silver Explore my World clause and I really enjoyed it. I’ve made a similar scrapbook for every trip since and a couple before. I haven’t shown you most of them. But the Iceland one is a bit different. All the others are 6×6 books on binder rings, with all my photos and paper junk hole-punched and popped in. The Iceland one is a real book.
It started as a Paperchase composition kraft notebook. (That’s not an affiliate link, by the way, I get no money from you clicking it.) It’s “oversized A5” and measures 190 x 250mm. I mean, A5 is a defined measurement. You don’t get to say “an extra-long metre” or “a large inch” but whatever, Paperchase. It’s 40 pages of brown paper and it has a proper thick cardboard cover. It cost the princely sum of £3.50. I chose it because it seemed good and sturdy and potentially fillable – I don’t like scrapbooks that finish halfway through the book. I split those 40 pages into 6 per day, with an extra couple of pages at beginning and end and before I left home, I got it set up.
I pulled out my collection of letter stickers and stuck the day on the first page of each day. Sometimes it went across the top, sometimes the bottom, sometimes the side. Then I had a little guidebook (that one is an affiliate link, I’ll get a few pennies if you buy anything after clicking there). That’s the updated version of the book I have. It’s small, it’s about A6 but it’s thick and it’s disproportionately heavy. It’s too tight-bound to be able to photocopy the relevant pages nicely so I traced the maps by hand, cut around them and stuck them in each day, along with the distance and altitude details. And lo, I was nearly ready to go.
I hot-glued a length of elastic to the back cover so I could keep it closed and I hot-glued another length to the inside of the back as a bookmark and as a home for dangly things. Both are messy and neither look professional. I stuck the Iceland flag sticker on before I departed Reykjavik and attached to the bookmark are phone charms – the horse is Sleipnir and the raven is Hugin or Munin, all from Norse mythology. The two round stickers went on when I returned to Reykjavik afterwards and the letters went on several weeks after I got home.
The little bottle contains black sand from outside my tent on the third night, with a label around its neck telling me that, and the rock is a piece of raw obsidian from a riverbed.
You don’t get to see the inside cover because it contains my emergency contact details and a map of the UK with my home marked on it – when you meet international people, the question “Oh, where in England are you from?” comes up quite often and since I don’t live in London, no one ever understands, hence the map. The other side has my itinerary and a post-it showing too many distance & speed-related sums.
So, here’s the first page. There’s a map of Iceland with our bus and walking journeys drawn on. Iceland was mid World Cup so a postcard by my favourite Icelandic artist, Ninna Thorarinsdottir went in. The business card is from the trekking company and has my special discount code on the back. And finally, at every campsite there’s a nice painted-effect map of the route so I printed an Instax version of it for the front.
Finally, there’s a page with various Icelandic statistics torn from a free guidebook and now we’re onto the trek.
Monday. There’s my letters, there’s my map, there’s my statistics. There’s also the receipt from the taxi I took from my room to the bus stop. The days are mostly writing but in the bottom corner, you can see a bad sketch of the scenery where we had to sit and wait to be rescued from our broken-down bus.
More writing. On Monday I experimented with not writing right across a big page but I gave that up by Tuesday. Other features: we have a panoramic postcard of Landmannalaugar, where the trail started. The facility fee wristband which allowed us to use the toilets and showers before we set off. I took that off as soon as we arrived that night and stuck it straight in the scrapbook. I saw some people still wearing it on day 6. Opposite is an almost whited-out Instax photos of where we stopped with the bus because I took it quickly as we scurried to the replacement bus and forgot to adjust the settings. In the bottom is an entirely 100% accurate sketch of conditions for the last 3.5km of the day – you can see the cairn we aimed at, the line of rocks on the horizon and the little blinking light marking the highest point of the trail.
More weird writing. Then a postcard of the mountains above Landmannalaugar when they’re not covered in snow and a selfie sitting outside my room in the morning waiting to be picked up.
I never used more than five of twelve sides on any day so I filled in the empty pages with 9×6 matt finish photos which fitted beautifully. I’m not going to show you all of them because I think most of them are on the individual diary blog pages.
Nothing interesting on the first page of Tuesday. We’ve got a big beautiful picture from Monday and then we’ve got the letters, the map, the stats and the writing from Tuesday.
Tuesday was the day I went in the car so there’s a sketch of the very black and white mountains we encountered along our snowy route. There’s an Instax of the campsite at Alftavatn and there’s a panoramic postcard of the lake.
Tuesday part 2 – a couple more Instaxes from around the campsite and my shower token. In hindsight, I should have put it up against the side of the page but never mind. And then we get into Tuesday’s big photos.
Wednesday. The usual.
On Wednesday we have a few Instaxes from along the trail – none of them came out terribly well but I like that they’re raw and real and that I can stick them into the book as soon as my tent’s up.
We’ve got something unusual on Thursday! A picture of me right there on the front page. I produced the Instax at first lunch to take a photo of the canyon and Francois immediately wanted to take a photo of me with it. So there I am, one of the very few pictures of me from the entire trip.
Something else unusual. An Instax photo of second lunch, yes, and then the energy-giving chocolate we ate on Thursday. It’s orange flavour, although the packet doesn’t make it that obvious. I’m not sure how I managed to get my hands on it but I’m pleased I did.
A postcard of Þórsmörk, although it’s not the part of the valley we stayed in. There was a little shop on the campsite so the label is from the bottle of wonderful cold fizzy sugary orangey drink I bought. And then there’s a postcard of the Unicorn (Rhino!) Mountain we’d spent all day looking at.
Friday. Same old same old.
Friday was the day I gave up on the walking mid-morning and came home. There are Instax photos of Þórsmörk and the campsite and then there are no fewer than three shower token. I used them one after the other for fifteen whole minutes of hot water. The tokens are only stuck down at one end so you can lift them up to see the ones underneath. I mean, they’re all identical but it’s the principal of the thing.
Friday end of writing plus start of big photos. That’s a particular favourite.
Saturday. We didn’t do much Saturday so there’s no map but I did put an Instax of the campsite once we’d struck camp.
Plenty of writing but no scrap to stick in. I should have continued with the drawing after the first two days. The receipts are from the swimming pool after I got back to Reykjavik. You get a payment receipt and then you get a token to let you through the turnstile, which I kept because of the World Cup thing – Afram Island! HuH!
I didn’t take many photos on Saturday so there are blank pages left for favourite photos from the rest of the group. Although six weeks on, only four of them have put any pictures in the shared Google folder.
I kept two pages at the back for scraps that didn’t fit in any particular day but in the end, there wasn’t much. There’s the napkin that came with my cup of apple juice on the plane and there’s another Ninna postcard about Icelandic weather.
So I used two of the pages to cover our road trip on Sunday. The list is a list of highlights from Francois which I had to guard with my life for two days, there are of course a few Instaxes, there’s our parking ticket at Seljalandsfoss, there’s a napkin from the nice farm where we stopped for very late lunch and that’s stuck down on two sides so you can see the pictures underneath. I was concerned about the leaflet from Kerið because there just wasn’t room for that and besides, there was no side I could stick down. But a bit of tape and that went in as an extra page, which pleased me ridiculously.
And finally, the back. On the left is actually a list of all the other walkers, their profession, their email address and whether they did the 4 or 6 day walk. You don’t get to see that.
The pocket at the back is made from a very old sheet of half-used paper from when I first tried scrapbooking nearly a decade ago. During the walk it contained bits of sketchbook paper and tracing paper which I ended up never using so when I got back, I photocopied sections of my lovely map and laminated them to put permanently in the back.
Finally, if you’re interested in that kind of thing, here’s my scrapbooking kit:
I have a tape runner, which still has plenty of tape in it but has suffered so badly from a week in Iceland that I can’t get any of it out any more. A roll of striped washi tape from Hobbycraft two or three years ago. Black and grey charcoal/crayons on offer from Hobbycraft a week or two before I left. Uni-ball PIN fineliners in 0.8 (for the diary writing – I adore this pen!) and 0.05 for detailing on maps and adding notes. White Faber-Castell pencil for drawing snow, 8B Hobbycraft Value pencil for other sketching. Double-ended black Sharpie that mostly got used for writing on the Instaxes. Silver Sharpie for the occasional highlight here and there. Silver Pilot gel pen that didn’t get used at all. Turns out keeping scraps of charcoal/crayons in a little plastic bag with everything else will make everything grey and dusty. In hindsight, I should have taken a sharpener too.
So that’s my Iceland scrapbook. It was pretty heavy, as was the Instax, but I don’t for one moment regret it. This thing is my pride and joy and the number of other people who admired it makes me particularly proud of it. I will definitely make another one next time I go on a trip big enough to be worthy of it.