When I was pregnant with our son, in the summer of 2003, my husband and I traveled to Europe for the first time. We stayed with a friend in Marseille, and then traveled with him to his home city of Barcelona. I kept a dedicated journal on the trip, a paper journal with the Eiffel tower on its cover. I wrote nearly every day. I wrote about the croissants and baguettes our friend fetched from the bakeries each day in Marseille. I wrote about trying to buy train tickets to Aix en Provence without knowing any French, and trying to figure out how to use a payphone to call our friend to tell him we’d be late for dinner, and about trying to order food in a restaurant where we couldn’t read the menu and didn’t speak any French. I wrote about how nervous we we were about all of that, and how much energy it takes to move around in a place where you don’t know the language.

I wrote about the anticipation of waiting on the roadside for the Tour de France to race by, and the helicopters and caravan that preceded the cyclists, and the clicking and whirring and whoosh when the peloton finally sped by. I wrote about following our friend in the car from Marseille into the streets of Barcelona, and how we glued ourselves to his bumper because we had no idea where we were going and no way of contacting him if we got separated. I wrote about our friend’s father, and his apartment and terrace and the meals he made for us in Barcelona. I wrote about the busker painted as a devil who gave me a devilish kiss when I tossed a coin into his cup, and how exciting it was to go to Spain where we could understand the language and speak it a little bit after being in France where we could not. I wrote about photographs I overexposed and missed forever because I didn’t set my camera correctly or didn’t capture at all because I didn’t have a wide angle lens. I wrote about the siestas and the heat and the walking and the pastries, and how my feet ached and swelled because I was pregnant, and it was July, and it was very hot.

As I convert this journal from paper to digital and read all the entries in the process, I am grateful to my past self that I wrote so much down. These entries took a lot of time for me to write — I frequently stop an entry to say my hand hurts, or I had to break for a meal, or now I’m on the plane after the trip and am trying to capture it all in the air before I forget, but it’s taking hours to capture every day — and I’m glad I took the time to write them. They pull out details and impressions, fears and excitement, sounds, smells, and sensations that snaps on a cell phone, or even nice photos with my real camera, which is how I now document my travels, just don’t capture.

My husband and I have traveled a lot more since that first trip, and I am — I don’t know the word for what I’m feeling, maybe surprised? wistful? — reminded of what it was like to know so little, to have so little experience with travel, and to not have cell phones to communicate when we were going to be late or if we got separated from our friend, to not have a digital camera for quick photos, and to not have a translation tool for signs and menus, or digital maps for navigation. I don’t want to go back to those pre-tool times, but this journal makes me wish I kept better written diaries of my travels since that trip.