Sisterhood of the Traveling Journal

A constant challenge for friends who live hundreds or thousands of miles from each other is staying connected to each other's daily lives.  Kendra and Valerie have found a pretty great solution!

   
Valerie:  After getting married and moving to NYC, I found myself in a different time zone as the girlfriends I was used to sharing my daily life with, across the country and feeling alone.  The Reader Question in Real Simple magazine that month was, "How do you stay connected to loved ones who are far away?"  One reader answered that she sent around a journal to her friends who were scattered across the country.  Each of them would write an entry and then pass it on to the next, creating a book full of little snippets of every woman's individual life.  I loved the idea so much, I immediately bought a journal.
   

Kendra:  We wanted a way to stay connected, to stay involved in each others lives as much as possible.  So the Traveling Journal was born, shortened later to just The Book. 

   

Every few months it will make its way to my mailbox, which I then proceed to re-read the entire book from cover to cover, excited about the new pages that are filled since I last received it.

We write all year round, so there's always something in there about an upcoming holiday or the change in the seasons.  There are keepsakes from our trips and weddings and pages of movie tickets.
    

We write about whatever our heart's desire at that moment.  We share our day-to-day, our thoughts, a funny card received.  It's always different, and it always makes me happy.

Some of my favorite pages are the ones where we do things together:  making lists, playing games like crossword puzzles, our hilarious group drawing, awarding each other with high school superlatives.

     

The goal to stay connected, I feel, is accomplished with every trip to the post office, every hand off of The Book to another, every entry read and shared.  Because really, isn't that one of the many wonderful blessing in life -- connecting with others?

We just finished our first journal, so we started another.

And lucky me - since I started the first one, I also got to keep it now that it's all filled up!
   

The Book has been traveling for almost three years now.  I hope we can pass these journals around forever.

How do you to stay connected with distant friends?  Do you ever send snail mail?