By Lincoln McElwee
I can still remember most of the trips that I took with my family while growing up in the Antelope Valley. We would load into the back of our father’s pickup truck (when it was actually legal) and drive for hours to our one-tank getaway for the weekend. And whether it was a day of snow and sledding or a day at the beach, my mother always made sure to do one very unique and sentimental thing with my sister and me. She would take us on walks, and on these walks around the surrounding environs, we would collect small bits of nature that we found along the way, such as acorns, pine cones, pieces of bark, seashells, rocks, sand – we collected it all and brought it back home to keep as mementos. These mementos were a wonderful way of reminding us of the quality time spent together as a family, and created a great family project of putting together travel time capsules with the different items we collected on our travels.
To this day, my mother still has the items we used to collect (and which we still do collect when we go on family trips together) in glass jars, and displays them around the house.
Whether you are already adept at collecting mementos from your travels with your kids, or if this is your first time coming across the idea of creating travel time capsules, creating these time capsules from family travel is a great concept for a variety of reasons:
1. Travel time capsules are projects that the entire family can get involved in, which is important when creating/designing something representative of your family’s trip. With projects like this, it can be easy to forget the little members of the family; travel time capsules, however, mean that everyone can forage for what he/she finds to be beautiful and exciting and worth bringing back home to put on display.
2. Walking through a forest on a guided trail or looking for seashells on a beautiful beach with your kids can help to show just how important nature is and why the preservation of it is an important topic. Parents can show kids what should and should not be disturbed in the environment, for instance, and how ecology plays a vital role in our everyday lives. In this way, creating travel time capsules becomes an educational tool as well!
3. By creating travel time capsules with your kids, you are also creating memories that will remain even after the trip(s). Your children will remember the fun times they had while searching for a particular rock or seashell, how much fun it was to spend time with their family in this capacity and how much fun it was to return home and put the travel time capsule together!
4. Making these travel time capsules is a very cost-effective way of memorializing your family vacations with the kids. Whether you chose to display the items in glass jars, wooden baskets or trays/bowls around the house, many of the items used to contain your project can be found around the house. Also, once you have the container, it is simply a matter of filling the container with the materials brought back from your travels. In this way, you save time and money, thereby devoting more time to creating these wonderful projects with your kids!
So remember, these projects can take on any shape/form; there are no guidelines as to how one must put a travel time capsule together. Whether you save them like my mother does in glass jars, collect branches and display them around the house or add rocks from various trips to your garden, creating travel time capsules is meant to bring you closer together with your children and to create wonderful memories even after the family trip is over!
