I've been sneaking vacation photos into my Year in Review posts, as we've had the opportunity to go farther away in recent years. The travel switch flipped when the kids got old enough to remember their adventures, so that during these trips, we can emphasize differences in culture and lifestyles abroad. Along the way, we evolved our process—to stretch out the enjoyment we get from our vacations[1].
There are three distinct phases: planning, traveling, and reminiscing.
Planning sounds like the most work—and it is—but we try to make it less tedious and more fun. We have spreadsheets, local attraction documents broken down by day, a dozen open browser research tabs, and usually end up spending multiple nights booking flights and hotels. It's understandable why people use travel agencies to handle the logistics.
But we still prefer to book our own transportation, lodging, and itineraries. Some of it is for the love of the game—looking for good deals, within reason[2]. A part of it, though, is that it's genuinely exciting to research what a locale has to offer for tourists. There are so many blogs, guides, sites, forums, and subreddits that share travelers' experiences; it's now even easier to synthesize all the reviews with AI to come up with solid recommendations. Our goal is to strike a balance between purely tourist attractions and a handful of "live like a local" activities as we discover them.
An underrated benefit in extensive planning is discussing the trip with family and friends before we go, and receiving their suggestions or having them share our excitement. For us in California, reliable vacation spots like Hawaii and Japan are ripe for small talk that lead to solid recommendations and travel ideas. In turn, we're happy to report on our experience afterwards to elevate their future vacations. I've really come to enjoy the social connection that we pull forward before we embark on the adventure.
Traveling is, well, the actual trip. Assuming that we did our plans well in the last step, we should have a couple of anchor activities, and a smattering of optional destinations and things to do that we'll decide on each day. Here, I'm reminded of a powerful piece of advice:
Travel like this will not be the last time you'll come here.
It's such a liberating shift in mindset, to avoid overstuffing schedules and feeling like we have to knock out some tourist checklist. It also helps that we don't really participate in social media travel oneupsmanship, so the Instagram sundae selfies and famous anime backdrops are completely absent from our itinerary[3]. Enjoying the moment means, in part, to avoid feeling like we're missing out; we can always come back.
Reminiscing is structuring frequent reminders of our vacations afterwards, to trigger those happy memories and garner even more value from the experience. I make it a point to lug my prosumer camera to faraway trips—to capture high-quality photos of the gorgeous landscapes, the spontaneous portraits, the unfamiliar streets, and the simple curiosities in our adventures.
Upon returning to my workstation, I spend a couple of hours to go through my stacks of pictures. Some of it is standard photo culling—deleting 80% of the album that doesn't meet the quality bar—but it also gives me another way to relive the memories while they're still fresh. The curated photoset automatically goes on rotation on the Google Homes around the house, and makes for a great conversation starter.
Then, a couple months later, I'll usually run a few physical prints: canvases to hang on the stairwell, a photobook to tell the story, and holiday cards to wrap up the year.
All these physical artifacts are here to generate memory dividends from the trip, triggers for reliving those locales and those experiences. And this realization has shifted my vacation photography. Instead of capturing portraits or selfies in front of famous landmarks, I'm more inclined to capture actions taken in the moment, without the subjects—my wife and kids—being fully aware of my camera[4].
Our Japan trip is a canonical example; all three phases earn their keep.
Now, visiting Japan almost requires a plan; their problem of tourist overcrowding has prompted most popular destinations to implement ticketing systems, which are often sold out weeks ahead of time. I dove into this maybe 4 months before our trip, looking up dedicated subreddits and travel sites to build up a three-week itinerary. Friends who had gone years prior were happy to vouch for certain attractions and give tips on how to book reservations.
The vacation itself was great, with set travel between Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka but loose plans within each city. Some days were dedicated to booked attractions[5], but we allowed ourselves spontaneity throughout, like grabbing a Pokemon café spot last minute, or hiking up the famous Fushimi Inari shrine at night.
By the end of it, I processed and kept around 700 photos of our trip. Three years later, I still come across these photos: around the house, on my phone, sometimes as reminders from my journal app. They're little souvenirs, personalized to our unique experience.
The secret here isn't to go on longer vacations, or to spend more money on more exotic locales. Instead, it's breaking out a singular element—the vacation travel—into three phases, and making the most of each one in accordance with their own rhythms. When we do a good job in the before and after, we get to tap into the joys of anticipation and nostalgia, as bookends to the adventure.
We arrived at our setup organically, but I felt validated when I read a similar idea in Die with Zero, while this video on "how to plan vacations" spells it out more explicitly. ↩︎
For instance, Tuesday mornings are usually the cheapest for flights, and if you hone your search parameters enough you can get a small discount at sites like Hotwire. ↩︎
When you're a watch nerd, what does get on the list is the Seiko Horology Museum. ↩︎
Okay, there's one major exception; my mom only wants to see pictures of her grandchildren posing in front of landmarks, and I do take a bunch of pictures to appease the grandparents. ↩︎
Major sites like Universal Studios Osaka and the Studio Ghibli museum, plus limited fares like the Aoniyoshi Kintetsu train ride. ↩︎
