It has taken nearly a year for this journal to be completed. It will be a year in two weeks that we left for the UK. People have asked me how I can remember the details of the days when so much time has passed. Partly that’s because I keep a very brief journal of each day when we’re traveling – a trigger that will remind me later. Then, too, the images remain with us. Art took many photographs, and when I look at one I recall the circumstances of that image. Sometimes the circumstances appear in the journal as a sentence, sometimes as several paragraphs. Art remembers the food, my memories are more around the people, the sights, and how my body felt.

We get to relive our trip as the journal goes together. When it’s done, it’s a joint effort, a collective memory. I’ll read this recounting several years down the road, and the trip will emerge from my memory pretty much intact. How lucky for us to have such a storage facility, in our brains and in our scrapbook!