Oh yeah...I've done this before.

A couple of weeks ago I was having a restless night. Tossing, turning, not sleeping.
Pretty soon my thoughts turned to my latest hobby, the journaling. The taking NOTE.
And it hit me! I have done this before!
Eons (or 9 years) ago our family of 8 (this was pre-Jaxon) loaded up in our 7 passenger mini-van and set off on a cross country road trip to West Virginia.
And I prepared a "travel journal" for the trip. I didn't call it a travel journal back then. I just thought of it as a funky quasi scrapbook.
I made color copies of sections of the route from an atlas. Attached them to pieces of paper that were 3-hole punched and put in a 3 ring binder for the trip.

As we drove I took notes of how much we paid for gas. $1.38 per gallon!!!
And where we stopped to eat. Sometimes even what we ate. 30 White Castle cheeseburgers!!!
I collected a bunch of ephemera while on the road. Took lots of pictures. When we got home I added all of these to the notes from the trip and put the pages in clear page protectors.
I never quite finished it though. So it has always been stored away in the craft room.
But this sleepless night a couple of weeks ago got my mind turning. I wanted to finish it but I kind of hated the 3 ring binder thing. So I thought it over for a few days and finally figured out how to remake it.
I used an old hanging file folder and a couple of the West Virginia maps collected on that trip. A little Mod Podge magic and a new cover was made!

It took a couple of days to figure out how to get away from the 3-hole punched pages. But I finally came up with an idea to stitch two pages together with a kind of paper "bridge" which I could then fasten together and into the cover with a stitched binding.
This picture shows how I stitched larger sheets out of two pages each by adding a bridge of paper in the middle.
The hardest part was keeping the pages in the correct order. First page stitched to last page. Second page stitched to second to last page and so on. Until I got to the center two pages. Sounds confusing, right? It worked out!

And then my daughter went into labor and the project got put on hold again while I took super deep sniffs of a newborn baby's head. It's like crack!
This morning I finally bound it all together, same basic idea as the Remains of the Day journals I've been making as far as the stitched binding goes.
And here's the finished project. It's been so fun to relive that trip. So many things change in an eon. ;)

Happy bonus - There was some ephemera left over which will be perfect for the travel journal I'll make for our next road trip to WV this summer. Yay! Can't wait to get that one started now.