Gas Receipts and Glue Sticks: The Ohioans Who Never Stopped Keeping Travel Scrapbooks

There's a shoebox in Ruth Ellinger's closet in Zanesville that weighs about nine pounds. It does not contain photographs, mostly. It contains evidence.

A stub from a 1974 toll booth on the Ohio Turnpike. A cocktail napkin from a Motel 6 in Terre Haute with a phone number scrawled on it ("nobody we know," Ruth says, laughing). A paper placemat from a diner in Marietta, greasy in a way that has somehow become permanent. All of it glued, taped, or wedged into one of the eleven scrapbooks she's filled since the Nixon administration.

"People ask why I don't just use my phone," she told us. "I say: my phone has never fallen apart in a rainstorm in a way I enjoyed."

What Exactly Is a Travel Scrapbook?

For the uninitiated: this is not a photo album, and it's definitely not an Instagram grid. A proper road trip scrapbook is a messy, chronological crime scene of a vacation. Gasoline receipts taped in with the price per gallon circled (so future-you can be horrified). Matchbooks from restaurants that may no longer exist. Hand-drawn maps of roads that have since been renumbered. Polaroids with that thick white border, captions written in ballpoint pen that's faded to a ghostly purple.

The whole thing is analog wanderlust — documentation as a hobby, not a byproduct. And before smartphones collapsed the entire enterprise into a camera roll we never look at, it was how a lot of people kept their travels alive.

Three Keepers, Three Decades, Three Very Different Systems

We asked around the OH Wa FG readership and found three Ohioans still doing it the old way.

Ruth Ellinger, Zanesville — "The Archivist." Ruth's system is strict. Every trip gets its own book, every book gets a title page, and every piece of ephemera gets dated in the corner. Her 1987 volume — the one from the Chevy Corsica years, as her family calls it — contains a receipt for $11.42 worth of regular unleaded and a note that reads, in full: "car smelled like burnt crayons the whole way to Gatlinburg. Worth it."

Denny Okafor, Toledo — "The Packer." Denny's approach is the opposite of archival. He uses a spiral notebook and whatever adhesive is within reach. We counted duct tape, packing tape, a Band-Aid, and what we sincerely hope was a glue stick holding down a ticket stub from a 1991 Indians game. "If it sticks, it ships," he said. His books are bulging, warped, and honestly kind of beautiful.

Marlene Voss, Athens — "The Cartographer." Marlene doesn't collect much at all. Instead, she draws. Every trip gets a hand-inked map — rest stops marked with stars, bad diners marked with a small frowning face, the world's largest something-or-other marked with an exclamation point. Her map of a 1988 loop through Hocking Hills is framed in her hallway. Her map of a 1996 trip to Wisconsin is, in her words, "a warning to others."

The Corsica Diaries

We have to talk about the 1987 Chevy Corsica, because all three of them mentioned one.

Ruth's was maroon. Denny's was the same maroon, which he claims is a coincidence and which nobody believes. Marlene's husband's family had a silver one with a tape deck that ate cassettes "about one per hundred miles, which we budgeted for."

The Corsica era — roughly 1987 through the mid-'90s — turns out to be a golden age of scrapbook material. Paper was everywhere. Every gas station gave you a receipt worth keeping. Motels gave you matchbooks, postcards, and those little shampoo bottles that fit perfectly in a corner pocket. The documentation infrastructure of America was just... lying around, free for the gluing.

Compare that to now: a receipt that fades before you get home, a digital ticket, a QR code. The raw materials are disappearing, which is exactly why the people still doing this are so devoted.

We Scanned a Few Pages (and Cried a Little)

With permission, we digitized a sampling of pages from all three collections — flatbed scanner, white background, the works. Some highlights:

• A 1979 receipt from a Standard Oil station on Route 40 showing $0.63 per gallon. Ruth has underlined it twice.
• A hand-drawn map by Marlene's daughter, age 7, of "the way to grandma's," featuring a dragon somewhere near Lancaster.
• A matchbook from the Diamond Grill in Dayton, closed since 1992, with the striking strip still intact. "Never used it," Denny says. "Felt wrong."
• A Polaroid of Denny's brother asleep against a window somewhere in Indiana, captioned only: "him again."

Flipping through these pages does something a camera roll doesn't. There's no infinite scroll, no algorithm. You turn a page and you're in 1988, smelling burnt crayons.

Now It's Your Turn

Here's where this becomes a community project instead of just a nostalgia trip: we want your pages.

If you or someone in your family kept a travel scrapbook — the gas receipts, the matchbooks, the hand-drawn maps, the Polaroid of a relative sleeping in a Corsica — we'd love to see it. Scan a page or two (a clear photo works fine), tell us the story behind it, and send it our way. We're building a digital archive of pre-smartphone Ohio wanderlust, and we'll feature reader submissions in a follow-up piece.

Grandma's glovebox full of toll tickets counts. That shoebox in the attic counts. The duct-taped spiral notebook absolutely counts.

Ruth put it best: "Nobody thinks they're making history with a gas receipt. Then forty years later, it's the only proof any of it happened."

Send us your proof. We'll bring the glue.