"Diary of a Madman!" Personal Page by Jerelis

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
~ Samuel Johnson, 1775 ~

Whenever we undertake a journey to a particular country we always want to know all about the surroundings, it’s history, it’s culture, which cities to visit, which hikes to undertake, et cetera. In advance to the journey we browse over the internet to get certain information and read travel books just to make sure we won’t miss out on anything.

Once we’re travelling we like to talk to the local people about their own country, their own region and those conversations will retrieve lots of extra information about some beautiful spots to visit, the ultimate restaurant or sometimes a particular area to avoid.

Ever since we had our own personal travel site an this one at Virtual Tourist we like not only to undertake the journey, but also write about it for everyone to enjoy. Just to make sure we won’t forget the details of our journey we write is all down in a diary. We have given the dairy the name “Diary of a madman” and it contains all the information we have gathered. We like to make the diary more beautiful to glue in some pictures out of folders and also the entrance tickets to museums, National Parks, bus tickets, et cetera.

This way we’re able to tell all our friends about our travels. For Virtual Tourist we can reproduce all the information for (hopefully) solid tips with lots of good details that will help you in your travels. Besides that it’s always fun to read about a journey we took for example 7 or 8 years ago and read about what we exactly did and how we experienced it. We also have managed to keep in touch with the local people we talked to and do nourish these contacts. On this Travelogue of Virtual Tourist you can see some pages out of the Diary of a madman and have an impression on how it looks. Enjoy!

The dictionary says about a diary:”A diary or journal is a book for writing discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period.”

We guess that this qoute says it all what we want to accomplish by writing a dairy during our journeys. The diary plays a huge role in many aspects of our trips. We’re listing the weather of each day and write about daily personal events. Besides that we make quick notes about specific facts we hear from the locals or read in papers. Whenever we’re back at the spot we stay, we translate the notes into a story of the day. It’s really a from of hobby writing and together with the pictures, entrance tickets and other stuff we glue in it we might refer it something similar to the term "scrapbooking."

The dictionary says about a scrapbook:”Scrapbooking is a method for preserving a legacy of written history in the form of photographs, printed media, and memorabillia contained in decorated albums, or scrapbooks. Historically, scrapbooking was a tradition similar to storytelling, but with a visual and tactile, rather than oral, focus.”

Once again a very good quote and refers to everything we do during our journeys. Writing, cutting, pasting, looking for other material, listening, reproducing, et cetera. We do have “scrapbooks” of the Big Island of Hawaii, Venice, island of Corfu, East Coast of Australia, Barcelona, South western part of the United States of America and many more destinations.

It's maybe difficult to make a dicision about this, but we have tried :-) Have a look at Grand Canyon National Park or Las Vegas and tell us what you think!