We Had To Switch Up Our Travel Tradition For 2021

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Families have traditions. For some, it’s meals. For others, it’s taking a picture at a certain location every year. For Sharon and I, we’ve 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 some of the photos we’ve taken in the last year

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

If I were choosing, we’d have a Mandalorian calendar on the wall. This is the way.

Or a Demotivator build-it-yourself calendar from Despair.com (yes, I bought this calendar for a year when it seemed appropriate.)

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.

For the most recent months of our 2021 calendar, we were looking back at when we were locked down at the beginning of 2020. Not the best memories but it was helpful to remember a year ago when we were enjoying walks around our development and empty themeparks.

For our most recent calendar, we have different memories of the last year.

We stayed at a cabin in Helen, GA.

Then another cabin in Pigeon Forge, TN.

Eventually, we made it to Key West to see the sunset,

managed to sneak in a trip to Iceland,

And even made it back to Schlitterbahn.

Despite some commenters who say that we’ve lived in fear for the past year, looking at where we’ve gone over the past 12 months, I’d beg to differ.

It’s a chore to put the calendar together each year but we have a blast doing it. Since I’ve switched to keeping our pictures in Apple’s Photos app, I needed to find a new way to print our calendar. There are several services where you can print calendars like Shutterfly, Walgreens Photo and Amazon (figure on paying $20 plus shipping for a basic 12-month calendar). I’ve switched to using Mimeo which is a free app you can download to your Mac.

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