One of the things Scott and I talked about after our trip was creating a photo book to commemorate the trip. I’ve made books for three previous trips and, while I loved the idea, I just wasn’t motivated to put one together! Although creating a book is a fun process, it’s a good amount of work to look through ALL of your pictures to pick out the ones that are most represenative of your trip. We talked about it every so often, but Scott finally got things together for the both of us and put one together. He worked on it for a couple of weeks and I looked at it along the way and it was completed a little over a week ago. We ordered two copies (so we could each have one) and, I must say, it came out great! Here are a few pictures of it so you can get a feel for what we did:

This picture from the Cinque Terre was perfect for the cover! We called it Volume 1 since it will become the first of many travel books we put together.

The intro to the Amsterdam section. We used an intro page like that for each section of the trip so we had a quick record of where we stayed, how we got around, and what recommendations we had for each city.

A collection of photos from France. Scott did a great job of inserting text (like what’s on the left page) in various places throughout the book to add context to the photos.

Since I love the UK so much, I just wanted to show off some of the pages from that section of the book. 🙂

I’m really glad we did this! We used Mixbook to put this book together and I had used them for two of the three books I put together of my solo trips. Their interface works well and it was cool to see the book come together and to be able to flip through the virtual pages while it was still a work in progress. Mixbook had a great sale (40% off) going on for Mother’s Day, so we ended up paying abuot $45 for each book, including shipping. Is that a little pricy? Maybe. But we both agreed that it was a great keepsake, so it was totally worth it to us.

How do you feel about photo books like this? Do you like them? Have you made any? Who would you recommend using (or not using)? If you’ve thought about putting one together before but never have, do it! And don’t think you have to have a fancy camera either. Every single one of the photos in our book came from Scott’s camera phone. Crazy! In the digital, paperless world we live in today, I think mementos like this are that much more special and unique.