My Little Girl and Me at a Freakin' Luau
Aloha (again) from Kailua-Kona (on “The Big Island” of Hawaii, a designation which reeks of improper planning, if you ask me).
My family and I have been away from home for well over a week now and, like any white knob stinking up a tropical paradise, I’ve been more than a little preoccupied with taking photos and otherwise capturing the magic and whatnot of our little adventure. Ultimately, this stuff will be shared both with the members of our travel party and with friends and family back in the Lower 48.
And, as you may have guessed, I’m using Evernote to store all of it. The workflow isn’t any more cumbersome and it adds a metric buttload of value. Here’s how to do it in a convenient list of easy-to-digest steps. Blogging!
- Create a new Evernote notebook for your trip. If you’re as big an Evernote wonk as I am, you probably already have one that contains your itinerary, travel information and other such details.
- Whenever you go someplace notable—restaurant, tourist attraction, etc.—create a new note in Evernote on your smart phone while you’re there. This will capture the GPS coordinates of the location as well as the date and time of your visit and embed this information in the Evernote note.
- Take a frickin’ ton of photos. This sorta goes without saying since that’s what we humans usually do. I personally avoid taking them from within the Evernote app because, when using the Camera app on my iPhone, I can snap many photos in rapid succession and sift through them later. Try to capture the overall mood of your crew, but don’t hesitate to highlight your loved ones’ personal quirks or unsightly tan lines.
- When you get back to wherever you’re temporarily calling home, open the note (or notes, if you created more than one during a given period) and add the best photos from that particular outing. Since Evernote lets you add text between images in the mobile note editor, I like to add a sentence or two of commentary between photos (if necessary). Remember that a single note can only be so big and that full-size smartphone photos aren’t small in terms of file size, so don’t go all hog wild with the adding of the photos, Jimmy.
- Tag each Evernote note with whatever short bits of descriptive text best fit the note contents (“sushi”, “volcano”, “parking lot” or what-have-you). Make sure the note is added to the notebook described in step 1.
Bonus Pro Tip: If you’re traveling with other attractive, forward-thinking Evernote users, share your vacation notebook with them (and give them the ability to modify the notebook) so they can add their own sandwich pictures or volcano thoughts. Then, at the end, you’ll have a huge collection of vacation memories authored by multiple vacationers! Indistinguishable from magic!
After your galavanting has concluded, it’s time to impose your memories on your friends and family. Even though these fine people would rather jam a sharpened screwdriver into their kneecaps, that doesn’t mean that we can’t make great use of cool tech while torturing them.
Of course, I’m talking about sharing your notebook. You can either share it with the whole world if you’d like or just with a few individual people. If nudist colonies are your thing, maybe consider the latter option. If you share with the world, go ahead and shove the URL onto Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest or whatever other social network is currently tickling your fancy. If you share only with certain folks, they’ll get an email with a link to the notebook.
Additional Evernoting Vacationer Thoughts and Ideas — Free!
Before you travel, consider adding notes to your notebook containing the following:
- Packing list (this way you won’t forget your iPad charger or that coconut suntan lotion you like so much)
- Name, address and phone number of the place you’re staying (so Grandma can call you if your house burns down or something)
- Travel itinerary and details: arrival/departure times, confirmation numbers, reservation crap, receipts for prepayment, etc.)
- Places or attractions you’d like to encounter while you’re doing your encountering.
- You get the idea…
Anyway, that’s the long and the short of it. Evernote makes it a breeze to capture, store and share all sorts of stuff: including a painfully detailed account of your trip to the slaughterhouse!
Special Bonus Below!
As a special bonus just for you, here’s a note from our current trip that properly illustrates just the kind of random event you might be interested in capturing and remembering forever because, really, it’s the little things that matter. Don’t you agree?
Want to know more about how to use Evernote?
