Mr. Wallaby and I love to travel. When we were growing up, both of our families took lots of road trips to all corners of the continental US. After college, I bought a three-month EuroRail pass and backpacked around Europe with no itinerary and boundless wanderlust. Mr. W has left the country once to travel to his family’s native country of Iran, and he can’t wait to go on more international adventures. He and I have been on several trips together and we are counting down the days until our honeymoon to New Zealand and Australia (!!!).
We wanted to incorporate travel into our wedding decor. Travel didn’t make it to the status of “wedding theme,” since our wedding is really just a mix of All Things Mr. and Miss Wallaby Like (vintage things, books, science, Persian traditions, botany…), but we are incorporating our love for travel into some of the details of the wedding day. One detail that we’ve already squared away is the guestbook. Instead of asking our guests to sign a book or picture frame, I ordered tons of vintage postcards from all over the world from eBay. I ended up with a collection of probably 500 unused postcards, which I filtered into a pile of about 200 favorites for our guests to choose from. On the guestbook table, we’ll display a suitcase for our guests to drop their love notes…
Vintage suitcase / Photo by We Heart Photography / Image via Style Me Pretty
I even found a sweet old box during one of my pilgrimages to the thrift stores, and the box is the perfect size to hold the blank postcards:
My vintage “card box” / Personal photo
Miscellaneous old postcards / Personal photo
I purchased a suitcase for the postcard guestbook from eBay. Right now it’s providing great storage for some other wedding-related things. 
/ Personal photo
This project is almost done. The last thing I need to do is create a sign explaining the guestbook to our guests. (For any sort of alternative guestbook, I would strongly recommend providing some guidance for guests.) Here’s some inspiration I’ve found from wedding blogs:
Photo by Luisa Brimble / Image via Ruffled Blog
Photo by Heather Roth Fine Art Photography / Image via Ruffled Blog
As you can see, most of the things I gathered for this project were great steals from eBay. If you are on a tight budget, don’t forget to check eBay and Craigslist for an endless selection of odds and ends. I even found my wedding shoes on eBay—I’ll write about those in a separate post. 
Are you planning on providing a guestbook for guests to leave you notes? What do you think about the trend in “alternative guestbooks”?
I like the idea of guests leaving notes, I considered it for a while, but the thing is I’m not sure what to do with them, so I opted for the fingerprint tree.
Great minds must think alike !!
Travel is one of Mr TTR’s & my themes for our Back Home Reception… and we are having a “Signature Tree” as our Guest Book, and a Vintage Suitcase as our Card Box (it’ll end up looking a lot like what you’ve shown in Photo # 1). Besides a place for Guests to drop their cards, there will also be Postcards from Places we’ve been on our Travels, that folks can leave us notes on for Best Wishes etc.
When all is said & done… the Signature Tree will be framed and hung in our home, and the Post Cards tucked into a nice album where one can flip thru and see both the fronts & backs.
Your post tho has given me more inspiration… I now plan to repurpose the Vintage Suitcase afterwards as a place to store Wedding mememtos.
Your finds are so cute, this is going to be an adorable guest book!
Ours is a questionnaire style guestbook! So its still a traditional book with the pages but its not just “write a note to the bride and groom” in the pages of a book! I am really looking forward to seeing what people write!
Mrs. Wallaby, Houston Age and Occupation: 24, Environmental Engineer Engagement Date: January 1, 2012 Wedding Date: November 2012 Venue: Oak Tree Manor About Me: I'm a free-spirited, adventurous girl who loves anything active, reading, traveling, cooking up new dishes for my fiancé, and working on my budding garden. My fiancé is an athletic, intellectual, animal-loving guy with an obsession with basketball and who treats me with the deepest compassion and respect. We are both engineers, and we met at our workplace. Together we complement one another and make a great team, and we are excitedly counting down the days until our outdoor wedding in Houston in November. We're planning a green wedding with lots of Persian cultural touches, and I can't wait to share all of the before-and-after details of our special day
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