I finally got around to adding pins from our Kentucky Wedding Roadtrip (watch the video recap, here!).

The process is pretty much the same for doing this every trip, but for a recap of how we made this fun interactive piece of art, go back and read this post.

First, I gather the supplies needed, and then I look up the locations on Google maps to get the pins as close as possible to their actual locations based on the towns and cities that our map has labeled.

(Sidenote: Yes, I know the floor is dusty. Our entire house is covered in drywall dust, despite attempts to keep it at bay.)

The only problem this time is that we’ve been through this general area on previous trips, so the map is getting kind of crowded in Kentucky and southern Illinois. Here’s how it looked before adding the new pins.

And, I was adding 6 pins to that small area of the country.

So, I had to plan my pins out to give myself as much room as possible. That means that two pins that are close together need to have the tails of their flags going in opposite directions.

Here’s that area of the country now, with the new pins added:

You can see we’re really doing well in the middle part of the U.S.

But, Florida has our only outlying pins…

 

(Second sidenote, the map has bubbled a bit in the bottom corner, I’m guessing from fluctuating temperatures over the past couple of months.. We might need to reglue it sometime in the future, but for now, I’m just pretending the bubbles are waves in the Atlantic ocean…)

Still, there’s plenty of time for future trips. Take note, Maine and Oregon, we’ll be coming for you in the future.

I think one reason I really like this map is that it’s pretty fast to update after getting home from a trip, even if it does take me a month sometimes to get the pins added.

I just know that I’m terrible at making time to go through all our trip stuff once we get home and thrown into the catch-up mode that follows vacations.

I even have a stash of stuff souvenirs in the closet that needs sorting and…well something.

And, I have piles of vacations souvenirs and other memorabilia I need to do something with. Maybe I could use shadow boxes like my friend Liz does, or some sort of glass jars (kind of like this idea from Young House Love). It needs to be an easy project though, because our lives are full of non-easy projects right now, namely, the kitchen.

So in the meantime, the map is a totally do-able way to document our travels without feeling overwhelmed by a giant project.

Even though I still have those piles of stuff to do something with later. At least the map is done, right?

How do you document your vacations? Have a map you fill in with pins? What about scrapbooks? Or shadow boxes? Do you have trouble organizing your trip memories, too? Share your ideas—I need them!