The Best Free (!) Souvenir

My faaavorite souvenir is also free (or covered by costs you’re already paying, technically). It’s your trash!

Wait, heh? Trash?

I made a collage of all of our tickets and passes as well as room keys and maps from everywhere we went after our trip to Chicago in 2018. This was Jon and I’s first trip together! It has since become a tradition and we have a gallery wall in our bedroom of all of the framed trash from our travels. If it doesn’t sound cute, hopefully the pictures change your mind. 🙂

Above is that first collage, from our Chicago trip on my birthday weekend. We saved our bus passes, L train tickets, hotel keys, and museum tickets. You can only see it peeking through in one or two tiny spots, but the background is the itinerary we made, printed, and carried around with us.

Our next trip was to Walt Disney World, and on this trip we had SO MUCH to save that I think I have even more trash in an envelope somewhere. The base of this collage is a map of our hotel grounds. I saved maps from each park, and some of the gift cards that we used to pay for parts of the trip (because fuel points and Target Red Card discounts).

We didn’t save a ton from our trip to Hollywood Studios and the LA area- it was also super rainy most of the time that we were there, so some trash was kind of ruined. But we saw CATS and went to Universal Studios Hollywood!

I feel like this is my favorite collage. There is just SO MUCH to do in D.C. I just included some of the major highlights- the International Spy Museum, the Newseum, Ford’s Theater, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture which we both visited for the first time on this trip.

I also love our last collage. The busier a collage the better the collage, imho. It’s been so long since we’ve taken a trip!! This is from a Florida trip in January of this year. In addition to Universal Orlando Resort, we went to the Kennedy Space Center and the Florida Mall, and played mini golf and saw Blue Man Group at CityWalk.

I hope that at the very least this shows that collecting souvenirs doesn’t have to be expensive! Framed collages are such easy decor, and you can make them out of anything you collect at any experience.

If you wanna read more travel content from me, click here! Or here! Or maybe even here!