My 40,000+ travel photos are all neatly stored on an external hard drive that is attached to me like a limb. Often times, hours are spent flipping through these pictures on my laptop remembering the adventures like they were yesterday. And even more often, the desire existed to have a physical photograph book to be able to flip real paper pages.

There is just something extra special about seeing your photographs in print.

So, you can imagine when Milk Books wanted to collaborate with Bucket List Journey, I jumped at the chance. They are a company that offers the opportunity to design beautiful photo books with a number of artistic choices. A bucket list score.

The process started with choosing a book style and theme. Easy Choice. Milk Books had paired with Moleskine to offer photo books with rounded corners, an outer elastic band and the legendary black cover that Moleskine notebooks are known for.

Of course the theme selected for my book would be Travel.

After picking a font and color scheme, it was time to figure out what this photo book would be about. Obviously it wasn’t going to fit all of my 40K in photos, so there was going to have to be a smaller topic that stemmed from the travel theme.

After much contemplation, it was decided that this book would be pictures of memorable bucket list checks around the world, the title being BUCKET LIST JOURNEY AROUND THE WORLD.

The technical  process of creating the book was pretty simple. The travel theme came with a decent format for all the pages, including inspirational quotes. But, you could also easily format each page on your own too, which is what I did. Some pages had only one photo, while others had six.

A benefit was that Milk Books warned me when the resolution was not high enough for printing.

This book wasn’t going to only be photographs. When space permitted, I was given the option to insert text under the pictures. This is where I wrote what the bucket list check was that related to the photos. It included everything from ‘eat a century egg in Thailand’ to ‘participate in the welcome dance at an African Maasai tribe’ to ‘swim with stingrays in Grand Caymen’, 133 in all.

The most difficult part of the entire process was picking and organizing the photographs.

After I had completed my book and pressed publish, I left the country for two weeks and my complete book was waiting for me upon my return.

It came beautifully packaged inside of a hard black case with the book’s title discreetly printed on the front. As I flipped through each matte page the memories of that past few years in my life flooded over me. Seeing all the photographs of the incredible things I have experienced in my lifetime made me get a little bit emotional.

My husband and I sat on the couch for the next hour recounting and reliving every picture.

Now, I want to make a book every year in order to capture my Bucket List Journey.

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