If You Didn't Make a Vacation Photo Book, Was it Even a Vacation?

This photo is underexposed because I gathered all my vacation photo books up to photograph them on my deck, but then I got distracted looking through all of them and by the time I remembered I had actually wanted to photograph them, not just read them all, it was getting dark.

If you didn't already know that I'm middle-aged, check out my super expensive hobby of making photo books of all our family vacations!

They cost a zillion dollars each, but I like to pretend that 1) it would cost just as much to separately print the photos, buy a photo album, and mount them (it wouldn't), and 2) since I only buy them when Shutterfly has a good sale going, I'm saving money on them (I'm not). 

I don't even care, though. If ever there was a woman who enjoyed looking at her amateur photos of her happy family on vacation, that woman is I!

Also, I tend to upgrade my choice of album every time I make a new one, and then like it so much that I decide it's my new standard, but then the next time I make a photo book I buy an even bigger, even nicer one and instantly that one becomes my new favorite and so it continues. My first few books, for instance, are 8"x8" ones--one of them is even paperback! Then I got way into the 10"x10" book, because I could make my photos so much bigger--

--but that was before I made this 11"x14" vacation photo behemoth:

To be fair, though, this was a long vacation, and I took a LOT of photos, and unusually, many of them came out really well! I love this photo book the most:

Today, I finished the photo book from our 2018 vacation to California over Thanksgiving--

--and since Shutterfly had a couple of great deals going, I also finally bought the photo book from last year's vacation to Kauai, which I made at the very start of our pandemic staycation, along with, you know, a lot of bread, but couldn't bring myself to actually purchase because I'm pretty sure that pandemic staycations mean boom-time for purveyors of photo books, and so there were no sales of note to be found.

So I spent a zillion dollars on these two photo books today, but I SAVED something like fifty-plus bucks! And they're both going to be giant and awesome and I'm going to love them.

And now I'm all caught up on our family vacations back to 2016. Heck, I don't even remember off-hand what vacation we went on in 2015... clearly I need a photo book to remind me! See, they're USEFUL!

You guys, Shutterfly is one of those companies that tries to get free publicity by doing those viral marketing giveaway things, so here's a link that gets you (and me!) a free 8"x8" photo book. I have no idea if this is actually a good deal or not, but, you know, if you've been needing a gateway into the expensive hobby of vacation photo books, here you go!