Retro Vacation Photos {Series}

My family took two BIG road trips when I was little. Both were to Oregon to visit my grandparents.

The trip from Missouri to the Oregon Coast is well over 2,000 miles one way so a significant amount of time is spent in the car.

In the photo below, I am about 6 or 7....my first time to see the ocean.

My mom and aunt took turns driving by mini-van, back in the day when it was perfectly appropriate to take out the middle seat to make room for a large pallet in the floor. Seat belts? Ha! I spent most of the return trip draped over the luggage in the back window, watching the mountains disappear in the distance while we sang loudly to cassette tapes of Garth Brooks 'The Thunder Rolls'. My brother and cousin played and slept on the pallet and I tried to entertain my youngest cousin who spent the entire trip strapped into a car seat.This was well before portable DVD players and none of us even owned game boys yet.

The 2nd time we drove to Oregon, I was 14. My dad came this time, and instead of renting a mini van, we took the trip caravan style in two small compact cars. I took turns between switching between cars with my parents and my aunt. Ah, the 90s.....I remember at one remote gas station in the mountains we HAD to fill up and the fuel was $1.03, the most expensive I had ever seen it in my entire life!!

Here is a little family portrait from the trip.

Here is my aunt and my cousins. And some weird photo-bombing kid in the background. 

For this special family vacation, I kept a trip journal. Here is a peek inside.

 

After searching through some of my treasures from my childhood, I found a paper from Jr. High that I had written about our summer vacation. It was a good thing I kept this journal, I'm sure it helped inspire most of the details in the paper. Funny, now that I look back at it, at age 14, I kept track of every boy who spoke to me on the trip....I was a little boy crazy.

Here are a few more journals from some of my other travels. I did NOT round them ALL up for this photo.... I have quite the collection of journals from my various trips.

I wasn't always extremely diligent about journaling. In fact, I particularly love the trip journal above because it asked me specific questions about each day....on other trips, I was usually so exhausted after a day of sight-seeing that I just didn't have the energy to catalog every feeling and emotion into a journal entry.

 Many of the travel trackers are stuffed with receipts, labels, and other artifacts from the trip. I love to make lists before the trip and write down quotes, restaurants and memorable things from the trip as we go along. I have travel journals from Italy, Australia/New Zealand, Sweden, Jamaica, and much closer places like St. Louis, Chicago, Washington D.C. and New Orleans.

The thing that people always tell you when you go on a big trip: 'take lots of pictures!!'

'We want to see them when you get back'....but people don't really want to see your pictures.

At least no one ever wants to see my old travel photos.

After some of my bigger trips on college, I very diligently organized all of my photos into an album with captions, but very few people really sincerely wanted to see them.

So here I am, with this giant stash of beautiful and lovely photos. Back before the days of facebook....before the days of digital photography, I took a lot of great shots with good 'ol film!

I've spent several hours organizing and scanning some of my favorite photos from my travels. Over the next several weeks, I will share them with you here. Can photos from the 90s and early 2000s really be retro? Well, I'm going to say yes....because they are from film cameras and they are part of my history.

Enjoy!