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The map of Germany was probably the most outdated because it was a map of old Prussia.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.