Repositioning Cruise Part 1--the Virgin Islands

For a family vacation, Jim and I booked a 10-day cruise which left from Philadelphia and ended in Puerto Rico. This is called a repositioning cruise because the ship is changing routes from the summer Philly to Bermuda route to the fall/winter Caribbean route. Both pairs of parents joined us for the adventure which was a tour of Bermuda, the US Virgin Islands, St. Martin/St. Maarten, and Puerto Rico. This entry covers our first national park visit in the US Virgin Islands.

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

 Photo 2: right layout page and back 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.

Generally speaking...

If you've been to Gettysburg you probably noticed that the visitor center also serves as the starting point for the Eisenhower National Historic Site. In October, 2007 Jim and I made a visit during my fall break. It was nice traveling on a Monday because there were no crowds to deal with. We did take time to walk through the museum at the visitor center (I have NEVER seen so many Civil War rifles in one cabinet before or since!) But the focus was really to visit a new park and to see the Eisenhower Farm.

This layout was made during my first "Virtual Crop" with Creative Memories. Using a Facebook page and their blog, Creative Memories would post a "challenge" and while working at home on my own I would create a page that fit the challenge and then upload a photo to their site.

The challenge was to copy one of their Design Team layouts. The company has changed websites and the original is gone, but a similar layout can be seen here: Click here to see the inspiration. To be thrifty I saved those punched out bits and used them to mount the title letters. I've said before that after a few uses, a sheet of sticker letters gets difficult to use because you are missing key letters. On this page I tried to use a salvage technique where I cut out around the outline of the remaining image on the sheet, mounted it on similar colored cardstock and then "fussy cut" around the letter before mounting it on the stamp. It was successful but I don't like the look of the residual white bits it generates.

The bottom right corner features a memorabilia pocket. Similar to the large ones I love for the brochures, this medium size one holds the ticket stub for our bus trip and tour. If you have an item that you are worried about putting in contact with your scrapbook pages, the pocket helps mitigate any acid that may leach to surrounding paper and photos.

I really enjoyed the house tour but didn't feel like we had enough time to see the grounds. The bus returns periodically and you are supposed to return on the next run but you would have to choose a later bus if you wanted to see more of the farm and the visitor center.

I used a multi-square block technique on the left page. I took a pack of 7"x7" paper I owned and cut an inch from two sides to create 6" squares. The 4 squares were mounted next to each other to create a background. Because my cuts weren't perfect there was a gap in the middle which I covered with a circle punch. It sort of looks like a sofa cushion button and I thought it worked well.  The other technique I like on this page is the journaling. I used a strip of plain cardstock, wrote out the journaling, and then cut it into strips and mounted it.

Again, being thrifty (and after all it IS called SCRAPbooking), I took one of the page remnants from the 7" papers to create the mounting square on the right page for the stickers and under one of the photos. Because of the memorabilia (house guide) taking up so much room on the page there wasn't room for much embellishment, but the stickers help revive that 50s-60s era feel.

Returning to my stomping grounds

This next layout is also from very close to my home town. Allegheny Portage National Historic Site is about 30 minutes north east of where I grew up. I'm guessing I probably went there on a school trip but I don't really remember it. I had stayed in the area for a state nurses meeting and chose to make the visit before heading back to Harrisburg.

The visitor center has a very small display area but I did like the steam engine that is reminiscent of one that pulled the canal boats to the top of the mountain. I walked the boardwalk to the Lemon House before heading home.

Although there is little decoration on this page (the only mat is under the journaling box and there is 1 corner triangle) I really like the layout. The "train track" on the bottom left page was made by taking 2 of the Creative Memories rick rack strips and turning them toward each other.

In this layout I took photos of the information signs about the 2 structures and included them on the page. More often I take photos so that I have the information to be able to scrapbook the page but it decreased how much I had to write here.

I like the addition of the USNPS stickers to the journaling box. Those are from the Eastern National scrapbook kit.

Some NPS sites are sadder than others.

This entry looks at a layout from my first visit to the Flight 93 Memorial in 2007. My mom and brother joined Jim and I for a Pirates game in Pittsburgh. My brother Joe left the next morning for his cross-country solo road trip while Jim, my mom and I headed back to Harrisburg. On the way I wanted to stop at the site not only because it is a National Park but because I grew up just north of here in South Fork. This is the literal representation of the phrase "Hitting close to home".

The site is a small red barn and a fence. Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, people leave tributes and memorabilia at the fence which the rangers collect and categorize. They have the transcripts of the black box recorder and reading it is incredibly saddening. We stayed to hear a volunteer talk about the flight events. All of the benches have the names of the victims engraved along the backs. One of them had the last name of Corrigan (no relation that I know of).

This was a more difficult layout to create. Although it is patriotic it also had to be subdued so the background of dark red with a light stripe worked well to bring out the dark memorial stones.

In this layout I finally figured out what to do with the large tag stickers that Creative Memories created. In previous layouts I had tried to write on them but being glossy, the ink just wiped away. The words "Pride and Honor" were all on one line in a sticker but I cut them into 3 parts and attached them to the tag and voila--a mini title. Similarly, I used the "Home of the Brave" to begin the title box. I really brought the emotion out. Simple stickers of hearts and stars finish the detail.

National Scrapbook Day!

Well, I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention that today is national scrapbook day. I hope you are working on NPS pages for NSD and if so I would like to see them. In that respect, I'll post another layout for this weekend. Here is a day trip Jim and I made to Assateague and Chincoteague Island.

Instead of heading to Atlantic Beach, NC for the family vacation, Jim's folks decided to stay closer to home in Ocean City MD. Jim and I took a day to get away and drove down to see the ponies. Not that we actually saw any, given our luck with wildlife.

Assateague Island is the National Park, Chincoteague is a National Wildlife Refuge but they share a unigrid. We only stopped at the Maryland side to get the stamps at the entrance center and spent most of our time at the Virginia side.

It's a fairly straightforward layout. The stripes on the top edges are simple design lines in red to help bring out the brickwork of the lighthouse. I purchased the die cut on the left and mounted it on blue not only to mimic the photo I took but because the white would have gotten lost on the page. This was a page done quite a few years ago and today I might have used chalking ink to dust the edges with a little color to help set it off from the page.

On the right the beach and pony stickers are from the National Parks scrapbook pack and really fill that space nicely. Sure more photo mats would make the page pop a bit but it's still a good composition.

This will take a little explaining

OK, so the next entry deals with a trip Jim and I made to the Poconos in March 2007. As you would expect, there was quite a bit of snow on the ground and to prove it, I'm going to include 2 layouts that illustrate this without actually including the national park entity. Here I am all bundled up at the sledding run across from our hotel.

The border on the right was from a class I took early on and I was happy to be able to use it finally. I don't get a lot of snow photos so I have plenty of decorations in stock ready to be deployed.

Below is another layout with us on the tubing run. Again the paper and border waited for me quite a while!

So, there's the proof that it was snowing. Here is the actual material from the National Park:

Well, I did say you can scrapbook without photos, just memorabilia. The postcards I picked up just didn't work with a snowy background so I chose a very rustic background paper in order to match the tone a little better.

We did drive through the park but with the weather (fresh snow falling) we didn't get to do much more than tour a visitor center. It's definitely a reason to go back. And maybe next time we'll go when it isn't snowing.

A little camping trip

My next entry covers a trip Jim and I made to Shenandoah National Park. While our 2nd trip to the area, this one would cover the entire length of Skyline Drive and includes an overnight stay inside the park.

This trip generated several pages so I started off with a single kick-off to introduce the trip (and because my previous layout ended as a one-pager on the left). It's mostly post cards and brochures with the exception of the photo of Jim on an outcropping of rock. The background is from a kit I earned for buying a lot of scrapbook supplies and is nature themed, so it will be featured throughout these layouts.

I am by nature a chronological scrapbooker, but these pages are more thematic based on what we saw. For instance, we saw deer in various places and on multiple days throughout the trip so I put all those photos on one page.

I love a good title, and thought this "Oh Deer" one really worked. You can see I'm using the nature kit again and the journal box matches in a way that almost makes it seem like a vellum overlay. On the right the dark brown paper is also from the same kit. The paper doesn't quite cover the page, but cutting a strip to put the white blank section just off center isn't a bad look for the page.

So technically, we visited 2 parks here--Shenandoah and the Appalachian Trail. Though somehow I neglected to get a unigrid for the AT.

Ah, another good title. The story of Jim mistaking a log for a bear is one of those that is remembered and repeated often. I was thinking about a title for a long time before I realized that "Bear false witness" summed up the story nicely. On these pages I used border strips and corners from the nature pack and accented with just a couple of stickers. I am quite proud of this layout.


The final 2 pages highlight our campsite and our excursion on horseback (which I highly recommend). Each page features a border that I made.

When you look at these pages individually they each work well, but as a 2-page layout it's a little unbalanced. So let's discuss each one separately.

On the left the border should have been placed at the bottom. With the die cut and stickers extending over the top it really pushes the border down the page. But the composition is fairly balanced so not a bad layout.

On the right the border at the top matches the nature page and you almost don't notice the white strip between the border and the photos. Again, the photos and journaling tells the story and the overall look is appealing.

Then when you look at them together you see the problem. The borders are unbalanced and it makes everything seem off kilter. Still, minor problems overall. And it was a great trip--that's what I want to remember.