“[A] yearning to travel to exotic, distant lands is part of a woman’s human condition, a yearning that grows stronger as each year passes.”
This is a sentence that my grandmother, June "Bug" Bradley, underlined in a 1983 newspaper article titled “If Mate Won’t Go, Go Yourself.” I found the article clipping folded neatly, flattened between two pages of “Travel Diary #3,” a 150 page handwritten journal that she kept during a 3-week solo adventure to Europe in 1982.
“Travel Diary #3” belongs to a series of 11 diaries she wrote to document her adventures across all seven continents over 30 years. This newspaper clip is just one of the personal treasures found among the journals, documents, photos, audio cassette tapes, and film negatives jammed lovingly into her (now-vintage) American Tourister suitcase that has been sitting in my closet for nearly a decade since her passing.
All images throughout the site are photographs of objects found in suitcase.
Click or hover over the Bug icon throughout the site for helpful tooltips.
The bug is here to help!
As of 2022, June has two great-grandchildren, and another on the way. They are the first in our family that won’t have the pleasure of meeting her first-hand, but will undoubtedly hear all about their great-grandparents from the rest of us. A rare treat, June has also left her own introduction in the form of her diaries – a way for future generations to learn about her through her own telling.
But the physical items left behind are fragile; some diaries already have bindings that have disintegrated, 80 year-old newspaper ink is fading, and cassette players are increasingly hard to find. And how do you share a small collection of delicate heirlooms among 3 children, 8 grandchildren, and countless future generations? The suitcase inventory and transcribed journals found on this site are an attempt to digitize and preserve these items, providing an experience that mimics (to a very small degree) the fun of opening the suitcase and exploring the items inside.
“Amusement” hardly encompasses the depth of emotions one feels when reading through these diaries, looking at the pictures that accompany them, and comprehending the passion for travel that June had. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, I’ve done a lot of googling to learn terms and phrases previously unknown to me. June was incredibly dedicated to her daily logs, including such detail that you truly feel you’ve gone back in time, and are sitting on the bus next to her.
Starting in 1983, she began taking a tape recorder with her on daily excursions. She recorded her own thoughts and activities throughout the day, captured historic details from tour guides, immortalized a chorus of drunken Australians singing sea shanties, and more.
She took thousands of photos, sometimes commenting that she felt she spent more time taking photos than enjoying the view - a feeling I’m sure many of us can relate to. But she looked back on her diaries and photo albums regularly, and her enthusiasm for photography only adds to our ability to “relive” these moments with her.
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