It’s Time For Our Annual Travel Tradition

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Families have their traditions. For some people, it’s meals. For others, it’s taking a picture at a certain location every year. Sharon and I have come up with our own little tradition. Like most traditions, we didn’t plan on it becoming something we’d do every year. It was more of a fun thing we did once and then we realized we liked it. We liked putting it together and then we got to enjoy it for the upcoming year. Who knows…maybe it’s something you’d like to do too.

We make a calendar using photos we’ve taken in the last year.

Sure, it sounds cheesy. There are plenty of calendars we could easily buy from a store.

There’s a Mandalorian Calendar, which would be AWESOME:

Or a Demotivator build-it-yourself calendar from Despair.com. Yes, I bought this calendar for one year.

Why go through the time and expense of making our own calendar? Several reasons:

• It forces us to download all of our pictures from our phones to our computers
• We get to look at all of the pictures each of us took that the other person never got to see
• We get the chance to reflect and look back at all of the fun times we’ve had over the past year
• We have to go look at Facebook or Instagram and find all the pictures we “know we’ve seen” but weren’t ours (such as when a friend took the picture and posted it online) and download them to our computer.

Here are a couple of months from 2023:

Great memories of our trip to Southeast Asia and from our last day of having an annual pass from Universal Orlando during Mardi Gras.

Not all of the pictures we use are from major events like vacations. We don’t even get to use all of the pictures we picked out but it’s fun to see the things that stuck out from the last twelve months.

Here are some of our outtakes that didn’t make the calendar this year:

Seeing C-3PO and R2-D2 at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. (Sharon was not impressed.)

And getting to see Darius Rucker in a benefit concert with Sister Hazel.

It’s a chore to put the calendar together each year but I have a blast doing it. Since I’ve switched to Apple’s Photos app, I needed to find a new way to print our calendars. There are several services where you can print calendars like Shutterfly, Walgreens Photo and Amazon (figure on paying $25 plus shipping for a basic 12-month calendar). I like the editing features of Mimeo which works within Photos and allows me to customize the layout for months with multiple pictures

So that’s our family tradition. You’re welcome to steal the idea. I’m sure we weren’t the first ones to think of it, anyway.

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary