Towards the end of last year, in the middle of our travels, I faced a challenge: do I begin working on a photo book for 2010, or do I delay the project until the end of 2011 and produce two volumes at once? Or, do I just drop the idea of doing annual photo books altogether and make a single book specific to our travels?

The alternatives only seemed to put off the inevitable, and I knew that the longer I waited, the harder it would be to remember the details. As satisfying as creating an “Our Big Adventure” book sounded (I admit I haven’t entirely ruled out the idea), over the course of our lives the trip will be just one of many things we’ve done. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of continuing the photo books as an annual tradition, splitting the adventure over two years—continuity be damned! So I decided to plow ahead, even as Bali swirled around me.

On New Years Day I started work on compiling and editing photos—beginning with the 2009 holidays in Austin. I got part way through our travels in New Zealand (about 2/3rds of the year)—when I ran out of time (and steam). We flew to the Philippines, and I didn’t have the chance to pick it up again until we got to Laos, two months later.

We completed the bilingual captions in Chiang Mai just before Stephanie left for her yoga retreat, so I was able to upload the PDF to Viovio and have it printed. That was the end of March. I had the books shipped to my parents in Austin so they could mail them to family in the US and France. Of course it wasn’t until we made it all the way across India (another month later) that we finally wrote the notecards to send with the books and mailed them to Austin as well. At the time it felt like a herculean effort, but seeing the finished product on Stephanie’s mom’s dresser when we arrived in June made it all worth it. Now, on to 2011!

Update: my photo-book code is available on GitHub.