The Travel Medley

Obsessed with tracking your travels? ME TOO.

Now you can learn how to make your own personalized push pin travel map – paper, digital, or both! (Both is the correct answer.)

I spend entirely too much time looking at maps. It’s one of the symptoms of my self-diagnosed wanderlust-itis.

One day, I got crafty and made this beauty. It hangs on the wall in “Michael’s office” (well, at least it did, before we packed up our stuff and started backpacking around Europe).

Crafty Paper Travel Map

Here’s how I did it: I bought this map that is likely manufactured to hang in a 9th grade world geography classroom, cut it into thirds, and affixed it to some foam board, so I can stick pins in it without damaging our apartment walls. (I’m all about that deposit money, yo.)

The map that I used was already laminated, so there was no need for Mod Podge or anything crazy. I used clear packing tape and literally just taped the map along the back of the foam board. (And nobody sees the back, so it doesn’t have to be perfect!)

But this was not enough. I also wanted to be able to add pins as I was traveling, so I made a digital travel map too.

Travel-Friendly Digital Pin Map

It’s really easy to make a digital copy of this art project using BatchGeo. Their website is super easy to use and I love the end product. You just add all of your places to an excel doc. The website has a downloadable template to start you off, and you can use a column to label “groups” if you want to be fancy and have different color-coded pins.

I went with three groups: Bri, Michael, and Brichael.

Once you’re finished typing out your info, just copy/paste from your doc or drag and drop your file onto the website. Wait a few seconds… and it magically creates a beautiful digital push pin travel map for you!

When you’re finished, it’ll look something like this:

This is just a screenshot. Please don’t try to click it. Nothing will happen.

But you can check out this ever evolving digital push pin map here, to zoom and click to your heart’s desire!

Depending on how much you’ve traveled, and how specific you want to be (exact addresses vs. cities/areas) it can take a little while to type out your data points initially. But once you’ve entered your backlog of travels and saved your map, it’ll be easy to add new pins as you keep traveling.

And this way you don’t have to wait until you get home from your trip to add your new pins! (Which can be nice for people who obsess over that kind of thing.)