Hello and Welcome!

Welcome to my brand new blog, The Glue Stick Tourist, devoted to my somewhat strange hobby of gluebooking my travels. Be sure to check out the FAQ if you're curious.

It all started in 2008 with a longish trip to Yuma, Arizona. I purchased a cheap blank book for drawing, but soon found that I would come nowhere near to filling it before I headed home. So I picked up some scissors and glue at the local dollar store and started pasting down assorted paper matter I picked up on my wanderings. It became a habit, and now I do it every place I visit.

And I do like to visit places. My wanderlust has gained a little bit of direction thanks to Markeroni and the eternal hunt for historical landmarks, but that doesn't change the fact that I will often just pick a place on the map and go. Not all of these places are somewhere someone might consider exciting; often I have no other reason for going somewhere than the fact that I'd never been. But I've found that many places have their own local attractions, and attractions come with tickets and pamphlets and maps.

I take photographs, of course, and keep a thorough diary, but gluebooks hold a different sort of interest for me. I'm going to pick up the pamphlets regardless (half the time they're shoved into your hands as you walk in, after all), and when I get home I can either throw them away or put them in a drawer, neither of which means I'm likely to ever look at them ever again. But my gluebooks, on the other hand, those I do look at. They evoke memories in ways that photographs and journal entries don't.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy looking at these. I've decided to post my existing backlog of pages in somewhat random order, starting with tomorrow. Once I've exhausted those there will be some silent times until I take my next trip. But, for my own sanity's sake, I do hope to be able to post at least once a month.

Happy travels!