When my husband and I went to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks last year, I scribbled some notes at the end of each day. Too sketchy to amount to a journal, they nevertheless recorded some important details. Once we got home, I typed up the notes and emailed a copy of the resulting document to myself for safekeeping.

It was so safe that I forgot I had it, until this evening. I’m laid up at the moment with a cold or flu or whatever the microbe du jour might be, and to pass the time I’m clearing out things from my email inbox that I never properly archived. Lo and behold, there were my Yellowstone notes.

Reading them took me right back to the Old Faithful Inn and the Teton bike trail.

I neatened up the notes, imposing complete sentences on my fragmentary observations. Then I printed out the resulting text and tucked it in our photo album of the trip. Yes, an actual hold-it-in-your-hand photo album. Now, when we or our kids look at the pictures, we’ll have more context than simply “ooh! what a pretty meadow!”

Do yourself a favor and take notes on your next trip, especially if it’s to a place you’ll likely not visit again. No need for elegant writing; my own sketchy notes were hardly poetic. I wasn’t writing for publication. I wrote to capture impressions that I was afraid I’d lose once the vacation was over.

I should have printed out my notes right after the trip instead of relegating them to email limbo for more than a year. They’ve come back to life now.

Take notes. You won’t be sorry.

(I managed to wring a blog post out of the Yellowstone trip shortly after coming home. It’s mostly photos. I hope you enjoy it!)