The Family Travel Map
When our kids were at home we had a Christmas tradition of making homemade gifts for each other. One year my oldest daughter Megan surprised me with a travel map that I could use to document my travels using different colored pin markers. I identified places I had visited with blue pins, places the family had visited with red pins and "bucket list" future trips with white pins.

We have this Travel Map hanging in our family room in the basement where everyone can see and reminisce about trips and places we have traveled to or trips that we look forward to taking in the future ("bucket list" items). It also helps improve our geography skills.


Some of the places we have visited.

This year as part of our Christmas Family Advent, one of the gifts we gave our kids was a framed map for them to continue this family tradition in their own homes. This morning our youngest son Austin opened his map and we talked about all the places he would be able to place pins: Mexico, Caribbean, China, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. We then had the idea to print up the Map Key for each of our kids, see below.

We love this map and know it will continue to be a source of great travel memories.