If you are going to keep notes of how a trip has gone with the intent of using them to write it all up afterwards, or even just to remember the fine detail, you'll have to work out a system that you're comfortable with. If you've ever read any of Paul Theroux's books you'll probably have realised that he writes everything down in a succession of notebooks - interviews, impressions, spellings, the whole lot. That's the advice aspiring writers are given; write everything down, relevant or not, and mine your notes afterwards.

I've tried doing that and still have a couple of 99c notebooks I bought at Walmart a few USA trips ago, but I quickly realised that after thirty years as a professional photographer my note taking with a camera was a lot more insightful than a few hastily scribbled lines in a gas station. At 'our level', where the trips are almost entirely for pleasure, sitting and writing everything down at the end of each day can feel like it's taking over - and if you're travelling with a non writing partner who wants to head for a bar / restaurant while you're still scribbling, can be quite divisive. Do it long enough and at some point exactly what you're doing the trip for will become a topic of heated conversation.

What worked for me for the books I've done is to use a camera (a few actually, but mainly a small pocket thing - not a phone) whenever something catches my eye, or I can see a story line developing, but keep a notebook for the things you can't easily capture - people's names for example, or conversations or stuff you can't realistically photograph (the Pizza Hut waitress with no teeth we met in West Virginia for example).

Even with the length of a book available these things can only ever be a truncated version of what the trip was actually like, a linked series of verbal snapshots. You end up having to pick and choose what you write about. Making my notes in image form has always given me enough material to work with. It also opens up the possibility of a photo book of the same trip, so instead of a writing book with pictures you can flip it over and do a picture book with writing. One 'advantage' I hadn't considered until recently was when I sent off some pictures I'd taken on trips to a motorcycle photography competition. I won a prize - a book! (The Motorcyclist's Guide to Scotland. I think second prize was two copies )

One final practical piece of advice on note taking - use a pencil. On a US trip in 2015 I made most of my notes with a pen. That was fine until we got soaked through in a storm in Tennessee. The notebook got so wet the ink ran and I lost what was on the bottom half of each page.