Several months ago, we moved countries (back to Canada for Seb) and as a little decorative idea for our new house, we purchased some customized city maps of all four countries we had live in together. This included Morocco (where we met!), Hanoi (Vietnam), a city we lived in for three-and-a-half years, Bangkok (Thailand) where we lived twice for a combined 9 years (!!) and Jakarta (Indonesia) where we spent 2 years. Whew!
For us, travel is a huge and important part of our lives and these maps really help to remind us of all those special times living and traveling abroad. It's a little something that instantly brings back a treasure-trove of memories. It's awesome!
So with this in mind, here are some ideas to do the same for you or a travel-addicted friend.
Adventure Maps
These personalized maps are super creative and beautiful. You simply send them a list of meaningful locations and they'll search from their huge collection of scanned maps and put them together in an artistic arrangement. Of course you get to approve them before it's shipped out to you. There's also some space for you to add some text, such as the place name, dates or a quote.
We love these customizable maps from Your Lovely Corner. Not only can you choose the city (or the state) but you can choose from a number of different colors that can contrast with the existing colors in your home. Note that is a digital download only so you will need to frame it yourself.
The idea of scratching off the places you have visited from around the world and trying to scratch off as much as possible is really fun. While this idea first became popular several years ago, there are now so many different iterations of this theme, including scratch-off maps of specific countries or continents for those that prefer to stay closer to home. We think a small map like this would be so much fun to keep in your RV. Here’s one for the UK that we love, and here is one for the whole world.
Photos are nice to enlarge and print out but they usually don’t look so great once you get up to a decent size to hang it on a wall. It’s much better to get a piece of art, and we find that retro art looks good in most home decor. Two or three of these by the same artist can look quite striking.
We absolutely love Dutch artist Laura Amiss who has artwork of many cities and national parks of the world.
We're not talking about your average tacky keyring that you buy in a souvenir shop. We're talking about a super dooper key ring that showcases the places that you have been and can add to later! That’s where the Etsy shop Dogs and Hats comes in. They hand stamp rings of metal with destinations of your choice which can be threaded on to a keychain. As a bonus, we think this could make for a fun key chain to fiddle with! 🙂
While carrying around hefty guidebook is now a thing of the past, there is something to be said for carrying a little book around which helps you to look past the main sites and help you to notice what’s out there. There are lots of these journals out there but we love this one from Listography.
If you like it, PIN IT!
Let's Discuss!
We'd love to hear from you! Do you have any questions? Ideas? Which travel gift above feels like the best fit for you? Any other great travel gifts out there that we missed and we should know about? Let us know and we might add them to a future article update!
Let's have a discussion in the comments below. We'd love to hear from you!