National Parks Road Trip Album

I have a feeling that people who know us have no idea what it takes for us to create our Trip Photo Album. If they did, they'd think we were crazy!

Here's what we do:

Step #1: Review all the photos! We had three cameras going full blast so there were a ton of photos. There were approximately 3,280 photos taken. I'm not counting the ones we deleted.

Step #2: I select all the photos I think are reasonable and place them on digital pages.

Step #3: Art goes over and red frames the ones that he feels should be deleted.

Step #4: Review our choices several more times. We have our haggling to do at this time... with gritted teeth (just kidding... sort of). Art remembers every single photo he took and I can't help but be partial to mine. Tiffany is in Chicago so she can't say anything and doesn't care anyway.

Step #5: I format the pages with the photos that we finally agree on.


Step #6: Art writes in the details of the trip; where we were, history, identity of the wildlife, etc.


Step #7: I add speech bubbles to show the gist of what we were thinking at the time. No, don't believe Art. I don't put speech bubbles on every page.

Step #8: We go over the flow of the pages.

Step #9: Take the pages to Office Depot to be printed. (They didn't turn out very well this time, but we no longer print our own photo pages at home because it's just too darn expensive.) I put them into a binder and make the cover.

Step #10: We make pdf and jpeg versions of the album for family (and interested friends, if they want one) and save them to a disk.

Is it worth the craziness? It's taken us nearly two weeks to finish this National Parks album and we were working on it constantly!

I just saw my mother downstairs happily looking through all the album photos and reviewing it with her journal notes. She's called Auntie Grace to tell her we're bringing her copy of the album over tomorrow.

It's well past my mother's bedtime, but she's still awake, able to remember again all the beauty of what she's seeing in the 97 pages of documentation we created for her and Auntie Grace.

Is all that work worth it? It is to us.

POSTSCRIPT (for my Seattle friends): The only food my mother remembers is the Ivar's clam chowder that we had at the airport. She says it was the most delicious food she remembers from the whole trip!

POSTSCRIPT #2: Yes, the cover photo was taken by Art. I conceded that one and even selected it.