I have to share our funny story first. At dinner only the 6 of our family showed up for several days. On the 4th or 5th night the last couple assigned to our table showed up which is apparently when they realized the ship was NOT returning to Philadelphia. I'm not sure what they had thought was going to happen after we got to Puerto Rico but they had to make emergency plans while on board to get flights to return to Philly.
Although the ship docked at St. Thomas in Red Hook Bay, we took a ferry to St. John where we met up with our tour guide "Thunderhawk". I am not making that up. He is one of the most interesting men you'll ever meet and if you can tour with him, by all means do so. He led our group along the Lind Point trail and down to Honeymoon Beach. If you do take the excursion through the cruise ship, remember to wear a swimsuit under your clothes as there is nowhere to change at the beach and he'll want to take you out into the water to show you some more interesting things. Only 2 people knew to do this on our tour (and it wasn't Jim and I) so we all missed out on this part of the tour.
Below are 3 photos of essentially the same layouts. I wanted to show them all to give you an idea of how I arrange my materials. When on a cruise I always save the daily calendars delivered to the staterooms and place them in page protectors within the day to day photos. That caused a problem showing the layout, though.
Photo 1: left layout page and front of Cruise compass
A little more about the storage of the Cruise papers. Creative Memories made 8x10 portrait sleeves and while they are great in 8x10 albums, the straps also fit the 12x12 albums (the only size I work in currently). The sleeves come in black or white which is the colored edge along the left. I've found that the color generally doesn't matter so even a black edge will look OK in a set of white pages. Each also comes with a piece of cardstock inside. If you have a very thin paper or want to use these for mounting additional photos I would suggest leaving it in place. I normally remove them and slide the Cruise Compass into the slot and then mount between the pages. I've used these for other materials as well.
When you have a large item that would take up most of a page, sliding it into one of these sleeves helps with space issues. Since Creative Memories doesn't make them any longer you may be able to find them on other sites such as Ebay or on some of the Facebook sell groups. Creative Memories is currently making a 12x12 sleeve which might work in a pinch but will leave a lot of white space along the edge and will totally obscure the opposite page of the layout.
Photo 3: I digitally edited the photos to create a seamless (or nearly so) look at the pages.
This is a fairly simple layout. other than the 2 borders there is just a little matting. The left border is modified (or "scraplifted") from a pattern I liked. I filled the squares with hiking paraphernalia and a "passport" sticker that is to resemble to Park Stamp passport. The ranger sticker on this page and the arrowhead sticker on the right page are both from the National Parks scrapbook kit.
On the right page the border is from the Creative Memories "Done with One" die cut pack. I just had to add the title sticker to complete the theme. I also added some tropical flowers around the photo mat to bring in the essence of our hike. The journal square came pre-printed with the remaining hiking icons and looked fairly close to the border on the left page that I thought it tied the 2 together nicely.
My final 2 pages of this hike definitely include the tropical notes begun on the previous page. The border on the left page is another die cut from the Done with One kit, and augmented with stickers and a few triangles almost gives a nautical feel.
On the right I fussy cut some images from an 8 1/2 x 11 page from the National Parks scrapbook kit as well as the flowers (from a Creative Memories decorative paper). That creates a nice anchor in the middle of the page. Although it is a little odd to end the layout with the trail head, it is in fact the order in which we took the photos as Thunderhawk wanted to get moving as soon as we disembarked from the ferry. We caught this photo before returning to the ship.
