In 1974 my friend Cy saw an ad in the San Diego Union travel section that said:  "Travel anywhere Greyhound goes for a full month for a flat fee!"  He had been trying to figure out a family vacation for that summer of the gas crisis and here it was. So he bought an "Ameripass" for his wife Carol and their two young kids for $495, and off they went on a Greyhound bus to Maine and back again, staying along the way with friends and family.

I just finished reading the detailed memoir Cy wrote 37 years later about the trip  - and at first as I read I was thinking like an editor – tighten up that first page and do you really need quite so many details and so much history?  But as I read on I thought (and then wrote to him), don't change a word, Cy. What a treasure this book is. It's packed with not only details of the trip, but also the swerves of memory each detail brought up for Cy. Everyone in the family kept journals (including Charley who was eight at the time and had his own unique way of spelling and Suzy age ten whose last entry on the last leg of the trip read: "we drove and drove and drove for about 24 hours." ) Their journal quotes offer a kind of Rashomon view of the whole experience. 

I'm telling you about Cy's memoir because this is the kind of book that self-publishing was invented for. While there's lots of stuff in his memoir that could be shaped into material for commercial publishing, right now it's a treasure of detail and history that needs to be preserved by publishing copies for family and close friends.

This is also a post about why you should keep a journal – especially on trips. How else will you remember in detail what everybody saw and ate and said and read? How else will you have all your memories to write about 37 years later?