Chronicling Our Vacation

When Aaron and I first got married and began going on vacations together I had a 35mm SLR camera which I used to take all the pictures that recorded our travels.  Two or three rolls of 36 exposure seemed to do the job of recording our memories nicely.  Of course, I wasn't pictured in many of those memories, because I was holding the camera, but that's okay, I was still there.  A few years later we decided to cave to the pressure of new-fangled technology and get a digital camera.  The number of pictures taken increased dramatically because why not take as many shots as you want if you don't have to pay to develop the ones that flop?   For the record, the increased number of pictures taken did NOT result in an increased number of pictures taken of me (not that I am complaining, mind you, I just want to be clear that I did attend all the vacations that we have pictures of, regardless of the lack of pictorial evidence).  Several vacations passed in that manner, until our next leap forward in photo-jouraling came when Aaron got a smart phone.  Suddenly he had a camera readily available to take pictures on our vacations.  Since I was no longer managing the sole picture taking device I made a sudden appearance in vacation photography.  It was a fun development.  This year, however, marks a new epoch.  This year we took FIVE cameras on vacation: Aaron's phone (aprox. 300 photos), my camera (aprox. 100 photos), Ian's camera (141 photos), Brynn's brand new camera (418 pictures), and Blair's camera (picture count unknown - the memory has room for 1000 pictures and it was full by day 2 - after that I deleted between 50 and 100 pictures of blurry kneecaps, extreme closeups of the driver's seat head rest, extreme closeups of toys, very blurry selfies and the floor to provide room for the next day's shots).  With so many cameras going we didn't miss a moment of fun this year.

For instance, this year we have pictures recording the goings-on in the children's section of the van.  Here we have one of the kids playing with a horse as we drove through Illinois.

 Here is a child coloring as we drove through Arkansas.

 Here is where Brynnie learned to take selfies, somewhere in Louisiana.

 We also got to see some great candid shots - like the top quarter of Cambo's head,

 and a lovely view up their mother's nose complete with lens flare (I just love my kids).

Still, when you have over 900 photos to work with, you are guaranteed to get a few good ones (brace yourself for quite a photo dump here):

The girls exploring a gun boat at Vicksburg National Battlefield,

 the side door of the Nottoway Plantation Mansion in Louisiana,

 Blair, taking 300 shots of a tree in the plantation garden,

 Blair, not being grumpy during the mansion tour,

 Brynn, as an astronaut at the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi,

 Ian, impressed by all the warplanes hanging from the ceiling in the WWII museum in New Orleans,

 the Battleship Texas,

 Ian, manning the guns on the deck of the battleship,

 Blair, testing the sleeping accommodations on the ship,

 Cam, holding down the steps at the Monument for the Battle of San Jacinto (War for Texan Independence),

 Ian, Blair, and Admiral Chester Nimitz at the Museum of the War in the Pacific, in Fredericksburg, Texas,

 exploring Enchanted Rock State Park in the Texas hill country,

 Blair and Cam watching the shore go by on the boat tour of San Antonio,

 trying out all the activities at the Witte Museum (where we had to battle for space with 1000 school kids there on field trips),

 and finally Blair at one of the museums at Fort Hood.

It was a really fun trip, and with so many pictures we will never forget one second of it.