Since somewhere around 2005, I made my dad a scrapbook of that cross country season every year for Christmas. Every single year, my mom would collect all of the newspaper clippings (because that was a thing) and I’d collect photos from teammates so that by the end of each season, I could put everything together to highlight that year’s triumphs and shenanigans. As you can see, I’ve always been all about curating memories into storytelling albums.

When Dad retired from coaching a couple years ago, I suddenly realized that my perpetual gift idea was suddenly out the window and I had to finally get creative and think of something new. Luckily, I didn’t have to stray very far from my original idea. After our family (minus Mom, still working on getting her across the pond) trip to Ireland, I decided that since we planned to make a family adventure an annual event, I could simply translate my original scrapbook idea into a photo book of our travels.

Click play on the video above to see the completed album. Below are the spread designs in order:

Since this was Dad’s first trip overseas, I wanted to make sure to include facets of both the journey and the destination. I didn’t want to merely begin storytelling from the time we set foot in Ireland, rather from the very beginning. Even if that meant having to remember the 26 hours we spent stuck in Newark before we could actually get anywhere. However, capturing the moment Dad looked out the plane window to take in the sunrise over Ireland for the very first time made all of that worth it.

In my opinion, because I create storybooks rather than just photo albums, I like to include text in every book I create. This is paramount in travel/vacation albums where the photos can’t fully capture the entire experience; capturing the mood and activity of each destination while relying on text to convey the reaction to it. Because I blogged every day of this trip, I was able to add excerpts from my blog directly into the book, creating another personal layer to the story. This meant that rather than simply using the dates and locations of each photo as the text, I could include firsthand accounts of what Howth sounded like, how delicious our food tasted, why a particular painting perfectly illustrated my entire experience in the country - anecdotes that we might not otherwise be able to fully recall down the road.

Since this was the first major trip where my film camera actually made it with me (and wasn’t lost in transit in my luggage), I was also able to include 35mm images into the album, even some that I’d developed myself (I was only developing black and white film at the time.)

To date, this has been one of my very favorite albums to create. Not only because I got to relive all of our fun excursions as I did it, but because I was able to combine several talents - digital travel photography and visual storytelling, film street photos plus the artistic process behind printing and developing, and anecdotal prose - to showcase our adventure is a well-rounded way. Nothing beats telling a story that you enjoyed every minute of!