This August I went on my fifth Wilderness Travel adventure, Hiking Norway’s Fjord Country, and for the third year in a row, I kept an illustrated sketchbook to record what we did each day of our journey. I’ve found that it’s a good way to document my trip without spending too much time with my face behind a camera while on the trail. Each night after dinner, I went back to my room, looked through the snaps I’d taken with my iPhone during the day, and penciled in text and images. Once satisfied with the layout of the pages, I inked over the pencil marks with a pen and then finished up with watercolors.
Any time I travel, I take along a Moleskine A4 watercolor sketchbook, an inexpensive set of 24 pan watercolors, a small brush, a large brush, a couple of pencils and black ink pens, and a rubber eraser, and I’m ready to record my trip.
These two pages were from our second day, when we visited the Borgund Stave Church. There was a perfect mix of nature and culture on this Norway trip. Imagine seeing soaring mountains and medieval architecture in the same day.
This day brought another great walk, led by a local Norwegian guide and landowner through the woods and across the fields on his own land, and a fascinating visit to a local family-run orchard.
It’s still hard to imagine we packed in everything that we did on this day. It started with a hike across a glacier and ended in a 13th century farmhouse listening to a master musician play folk music on a Hardanger fiddle by firelight.
You can see all the pages, as well as all of the pages from last year’s Wilderness adventure, Hiking the Greek Isles (with the pre-trip Archaeological Sites of Classical Greece Extension) at www.susannereece.com. Follow me on Instagram @susannemreece.
This page is from the first official day of the trip when we met up with the hiking group. We toured the Acropolis and the Acropolis museum and then had a ferry ride from Athens to the island of Tinos. The trip had such long, busy days, that I was barely able to keep up and only managed to do one page a day.
-Sketchbook and text by 5-time WT adventurer Susanne Reece, Hiking Norway’s Fjord Country and Hiking the Greek Isles
See pages from Susanne’s Hiking in Tuscany Sketchbook here.
