How should I document my 2005 honeymoon?

Last week, I went through a big box of photos and memorabilia that's been sitting in our house for years (untouched). Some of that stuff ended up in the trash, but I divided most of it into boxes by category. One of those categories is projects. The "projects" box contains just the paper memorabilia (aka ephemera) I saved over the years that made it into the giant box. Trust me, there's more where that came from, it's just not sitting in my office.

Considering how not on top of this stuff I usually am, I was crazy-surprised to find a plastic bag containing all of the ephemera from our honeymoon. It was like opening a time capsule. We got married in May 2005 and took our honeymoon in July that year. Naturally, Nick had to be on the ship five days after our wedding, so we got married in Los Angeles, spent the weekend in Monterey and then parted ways.

I returned to my apartment and my job in San Diego the week after our wedding, and Nick spent a couple weeks on the aircraft carrier. In June, I moved up to where he'd been stationed on a jet base in central California, about three hours north of LA. We got the all-clear from his commanding officer that we could take a couple weeks in July and get a proper honeymoon. So we bought tickets to Costa Rica, booked hotels, and planned the trip.

I have all the photos from the honeymoon stored on an external hard drive, but I've never done anything with them. I think there are some pretty decent pics, although of course we didn't have smart phones or Instagram filters or anything like that. So who knows what they'll look like now?

And who cares?

It would be awesome to document this epic trip, even if it's a decade later and even if the photos aren't amaze-balls.

So now I have to figure how I'll document it. I have all of this great stuff I want to include in addition to the photos. I was thinking of doing a 6x8 album. I like pocket pages because the plastic sheets protect the photos from the dirt and oil on hands. And pockets would provide a little structure and give me a place to put all the little paper things I managed to save.

But what about doing something a little different? I love this concept from Kelly Purkey (after all, if you're building a travel mini-book, where else do you look for inspiration?!). But I think our trip is too big to document in such a small book. I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw this photobook by Liz. A Moleskine photo book could be interesting - I could include photos but also add blank pages throughout where I could paste the memorabilia directly on the paper and write captions. I like that they lie flat and have an elastic closure, and I like that the page numbers are limited. So that's an option.

But maybe the answer is to do some kind of mini book - a 6x8? a mix of page protectors and hole-punched paper goodness? I'm basically obsessed with every mini book Caylee and Stephanie have ever made. And I'm loving the 6x8 size for my December album. That's a thought.

As I look back over all the things that remind me of those two weeks, I'm struck by how much memory dulls the sharpness of the moment. I got a little annoyed that I hadn't yet done anything with this stuff, that I hadn't documented our honeymoon while the memories were fresh. But maybe this is the perfect time to put together an album that will document those weeks - maybe a little perspective means I'll leave out the details that don't matter and really capture the essence of what that the trip meant to us then and what it means to us now.

Or maybe, as Caylee put it, "it was a little week of magic, and magic really struggles to be captured appropriately." 

I'm so curious: what would you do with this stuff?

I have a couple hundred photos to sift through, lots of great ephemera I could include. It's all just begging to be documented and I'd love to hear your thoughts! If you've been reading my blog for any amount of time, you probably know I'm embellishment-averse, so this is going to be a challenge for me, but one I'm so excited to take on. I'll keep you posted on next steps, but if you have any thoughts or ideas, please let me know.

For further reading, check out how I started organizing all this stuff or how I photograph memorabilia.