Hey, it’s exciting, and it can work – Christmas Day flights are often discounted, plus you have a solid week before the kids are back in school. Perhaps someday I’ll try this approach. The problem I see with it is, I think it’s much more fun to know where you’re going, and properly prepare for it, than to be surprised and whoosh, off you go. I suppose some destinations don’t really need prep – like, a beach resort or a ski lodge – but, come on, if you’re going to a cultural destination, you want to enjoy the specific run-up to that trip.
That doesn’t mean I don’t give travel for Christmas. This year, I gave the family as their main presents two travel-related products. I’ll get to the second in the next post, but the first one is one I’m really quite proud of, it may be the best actual physical object I’ve ever produced -- click on the photo and you'll see the picture book I created for our 2016 trip:
Sure, I’ve done plenty of photo books, so have you; they’re easy now. The Shutterfly algorithms can put it all together for you pretty well, if you want, just upload your photos. But this? Thanks to my running travel blog from the last trip, I was able to meld the photos together with an actual detailed description of our activities. That Germany trip was only 18 months old, but there were specifics we’d already forgotten, since not everything has a picture to go against it.
So – on your next big trip – you don’t have to blog, but do take a few minutes at the end of each day and summarize what you did, and equally importantly, how you felt about it. The latter is the kind of stuff future readers, yourself or otherwise, will want to know. Then, add it to your photo book.
Adding the text turned out to be tricky. I myself had so much writing that spacing, editing, and formatting became an issue; perhaps my future efforts will be more spare. I tried several different services to make this work – initially, I thought I could do it all in Word and then upload it to a book print service (Blurb was what I was working with). That didn’t work out, every upload would reformat the doc slightly and shift all the embedded photos. This ended up in many hours of reformatting, and frustration, before capitulation.
Your local print shops can handle these, as long as you don’t mind cheaper binding. I wanted sturdy book binding and covering, so that was out.
I ended back at Shutterfly, since I’m familiar with that tool, and the end product (that is, the pictures need to come out well). My original vision was to embed photos in the text, but I mostly abandoned that, too difficult in Shutterfly. And there were other quirks on formatting that needed to be overcome; not the least is planning it all out to make the texts and photos more or less match. Lastly, their text editing is cumbersome: a good deal of punctuation didn’t get copied over from the original Word document, so the text is rife with typos. I went over it several times, but still managed to miss more than a few apostrophes and dashed. Oh well. I’m still proud of the end result.
Taking notes is also a great evening activity (ask everyone in your travel group, for example, to tell their favorite part of that day). You don’t need to be Sven Hedin here, but you’ll be surprised at how much you miss if you do photos alone.
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