I wanted to write a travel blog before travel blogs existed 

I’ve been writing about travel in one format or another almost all my life, starting with the scrapbook diary I made on my first foreign holiday and eventually getting to this travel blog. 

I only recently migrated my content from three previous travel blogs, email lists and private online diaries to steppeinstyle.com, but even before creating those records of my travels from 2003 onwards I used to keep pen and paper notes. 

Back in 1987 I went abroad for the first time. I was nine then, and it was seven years before Justin Hall created Links.net, the world’s very first blog. 

That’s a year later than the average age Brits take their first trip abroad these days — but it seems pretty old to me because my daughter was less than nine weeks old when I flew out to Romania with her and she’s had a passport since a few weeks after she was born. 

Touring France by car

The first trip for our family was to France, where my parents had booked a cottage in a small village in the Auvergne through Gîtes de France. 

Rather than flying or even zooming down the motorway, we crossed the Channel with Brittany Ferries took three days meandering slowly south from Calais, staying at campsites or small hotels along the way, and the same to return home. 

My parents were both teachers and my mum decided that to make the journey a leaning experience we would have theme; she picked Romanesque churches. So my brother and learned how to recognise the difference between Romanesque and gothic churches — basically the former has rounded windows and doors, and the latter has pointy ones — and visited several during the trip. 

She also bought us both spiral bound notebooks so we could write up the day’s events and stick in tickets, food wrappers, postcards and anything else we collected along the way. 

We both collected several wrappers for the small cubes of white sugar that were placed on cafe tables along with my parents’ cups of cafe au lait, and as neither of them take sugar we got to scoff them — another exciting treat as we’d never seen them in England and we rarely went to cafes at all, let alone pavement ones in city squares. 

We each had a second-hand Box Brownie camera with a single six-photo reel of film. The cameras could only be used in sunny weather so every day we eagerly opened the curtains to see if we’d be able to take one of our six precious pictures that day. 

I kept the scrapbook I made on that trip and three others from later holidays for over 30 years, and they have always been a wonderful reminder of those trips. 

As I got older I increasingly added personal recollections as well as an account of where we went — my brother and I both mentioned the crates of wine our parents stashed below our feet in the back of the car on the way back from France — and writing it all down at the end of the day made me observe more keenly and look out for interesting observations and anecdotes to add. In fact, this was definitely what first made me interested writing a travel blog. 

Scrapbook pack list

If you want to write a travel blog the old fashioned way with your kids (or for yourself) I recommend bringing the following: pens, pencils, rubber, pencil sharpener, scissors, sellotape, glue, an A4 notebook, an envelope or plastic sleeve for loose papers.