Going on trips before social media

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Last Updated on 24th July 2020

If you’re a travel blogger in your late 30s and beyond you possibly rue all those amazing trips you had in the 90s/early “noughties” that you couldn’t blog/Instagram/Tweet about as social media didn’t exist back then! Trips before social media seemed to much more simple. You’d simply take along your camera with a few rolls of 36 exposuire film .. and that was it!

I hadn’t really considered this until I stumbled across a photo album back at my parent’s house. It contained photos from a trip I took to Hawaii via Los Angeles back in 2002. It’s a red coloured, sturdy bound album containing 100 6×4 glossy photos held neatly in little see-through pockets.

It was rather nostalgic having something tangible to hand that I could actually see and hold, rather than finding a random memory stick at the back of a drawer that’s now obsolete anyway as you’ve updated your laptop a few times since you last inserted it. Either way this was a trip I’d love to go on now as it would allow me to blog/Instagram/Tweet about it to my heart’s content.

Other people have been there before you know!

It made we think about some recent well-written articles, published by young 20-something bloggers. Articles that might give the impression that they were the first travel bloggers to explore such destinations. Possibly because of there being few existing posts about certain places?

Well kind of “yes” as we weren’t technically travel bloggers back when we visited, but kind of “no” as lots of us have been to these places over the last 20 years. It’s just we didn’t have the opportunity to tell a wider audience at the time.

Unless you wrote a book or an article in a magazine, trips before social media were much more of a private thing. Also check out my other post about how we researching locations before we had the Internet!

Trips before social media. Only family ever saw my photos

So with that in mind I’ve cherrypicked four photos above from my trip to Hawaii. Four photos I’d have loved to have blogged/Tweeted/Instagrammed back in 2002. My two week trip started out on the famous beaches of Oahu. Before moving onto the active volcanoes of the Big Island. Subsequently ending up on the mountainous and quite spectacular island of Maui.

The highlight for me was learning to surf on Waikiki Beach. A close second driving a 4.0 liter automatic Jeep along Maui’s famous Hana Highway. It’s just very scary to think that I did this over 15 years ago now!

What wonderful trips have you been on before social media came along?

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