It’s hard to know when it’s a good time to take expensive equipment to sandy or otherwise damaging locations. We don’t have a real photographer’s camera; ours is compact and light, so we never feel like we’re lugging it. I’m sure you’ll get your bubble photo op in the future!

Drinking may temporarily help me avoid thinking about going back to real life, but I think the hangover effects (especially when I wake up early and have to board a plane) may render it a less than ideal solution. =)

The bubble picture rubs salt in my uncommitted photographer wounds. When I visited the beach on my trip home last week, I didn’t feel like lugging my camera. Then this guy kept going out on a raft into the lake and blowing massive bubbles. I really wished I’d brought my camera.

Yes, I start thinking about (and, sadly dreading) going back to work towards the end of a vacation. I can’t seem to help it. Did the drinking help?

The only problem with the timestamp on the photos was that sometimes when we would enter a new country in a different time zone, I would forget to update the camera when we landed. So some of the photos would be listed with the correct date and time, and some I would have to fix later by looking at the number sequence.

Thanks for explaining… and I forgot about the fact that photos do jog memory very well, and presumably all of your digital pics would be time-stamped, so you could easily figure out what all happened on which days.

When I was at work, I used an old-fashioned paper planner. Many of my office environments did not allow PDA syncing, so it was easier to keep my schedule with me in one place than try to merge various electronic calendars. So I used the same thing for the 30/40 World Tour, but I downsized (and have stuck with the smaller size). My old black leather-bound planner was a 1.5 inch binder, while my new red one is 1 inch. I was able to keep a lot more address pages and business cards in the old one, but the weight and size were significant.

I generally use Franklin Covey compact-size single page-per-day pages. But they changed printers right before our trip, so I was unable to get refill pages for the months I needed before our departure. Mr. HalfFull found a substitute at Office Depot, but the pages are slightly smaller and the paper quality is inferior, which makes erasing difficult.

I was able to keep track of our scheduled events like flights or meeting people on the planner pages. If something particularly interesting happened, I would often jot it down at the bottom of the page. But a lot of my details also came from the photos. There were some days when I didn’t write anything, but the photos would jog my memory.

I have a big question for you, Ms. HalfEmpty… how did you take notes on this whole trip? Surely your memory hasn’t sufficed in providing all the detail for these extremely detailed blog posts? Did you take notes digitally, or did you carry a notebook? If a notebook, what size? did you organize it in any particular way?