As a travel nurse, you are going to experience a wide range of new places and cultures. The ability to pick up and explore a new community is one of the greatest strengths of the profession! However, you may be asking "What should I take back from this experience as a memento?" As a traveler, you may not want to weigh yourself down with large items, but piles of promotional papers or photographs won't express the thrilling adventure you had.
Here are three tips for finding and displaying keepsakes from an assignment:
1. Framed photo. If you have one photo that embodies an emotional connection to a location, you can have it printed out and framed. However, instead of using boring matting, consider covering the black stiff board framing the image with a map of the roadways for that city. This do-it-yourself project will allow you to display one of your favorite pictures from a travel destination and the fun tourist roadmap you may have used when you first began exploring an area.
2. Ticket display. Attending concerts, plays or other cultural events is part of the fun of soaking up the experience of living in a new community. However, the habit will also create a lot of paper, and you may loath to throw away a ticket memento. Use a mason jar or build a shadow box to display all of your ticket stubs from a particular city, year or type of event.
3. Pick one item to save. While you may want to save many items as keepsakes, the practice will typically increase your risk of developing piles of clutter that require storage. Limit yourself to saving only one item (excluding paper products) from a destination. Make sure the memento indicates exactly where it is from. For example, if you are working at a medical facility in Salem, Massachusetts, you may want to purchase something related to witchcraft, but if you are in Portland, Oregon, you might want to save a bottle from a microbrewery or a bag of coffee beans. Pick one item that can be easily stored and travel with you for convenience and you may never run out of room in your home or forget the places you have been.