End of Summer pages: Vacation pages

Since I grew up in Maine, and my parents still live there, we travel there every other summer, alternating with the West Coast to visit Derick's family. I put together an 8.5x11 vacation album, generally using one product line and the same layout design every year. I'm a little behind right now, but I always use some of my favorite photos to scrap and put in the family album. I already shared my son's love of Sand Beach; here's a couple more I did this year:

 

Maine = lobster. Truth be told, when I was young, I couldn't eat them, ever since I saw my grandfather kill it and disassemble it. The tomalley is NOT for the faint hearted. (Don't click the link if you have a faint heart.) When I finally ate one as a teenager, I loved it, and we now have a lobster boil every time we go home.

My boys are channeling me as a child. They love the live lobster (it's creepy!), but the eating...is a little sketchy. This time they happily ate the claw, but the tail was a little much. So, the title popped to mind--The Boys vs. the Lobster--paired with the white space on the lobster photo. I used the Studio Calico kit So Cal. Interesting that it looked good with Maine photos, LOL!

(Interesting design note: I designed this page with four 3x3 photos and one 4x6 photo in mind. There are only a few ways to fit the photos together, so this arrangement was what I chose, however, when I went to build the page, I only had two 3x3 photos. The bottom ones I'd apparently thought about printing but never did. This was the first time I ever had to leave two spots for photos then go back and add them to finish the page.)

Another photo, this time from Acadia (I swear this page is not crooked):

 

I love this photo, which I took on my iPhone. A few years ago, I took a similar photo with my husband and son on the Ocean Path. I enlarged it at National Camera Exchange (an 8x12 photo) and scrapped it with very little land and lots of sky and sea. I enlarged it again, and even though it's a little grainy, I think it still looks stunning big. I believe this was when we climbed Gorham Mountain. Might have been Ocean Path, but I can't remember. I used Studio Calico's Elmwood Park for this page. Here's some details:

 

Lots of October Afternoon 9 to 5 which went surprisingly well on an outdoorsy page.

  

I also used a little of OA's Woodland Park--not much, because it was a little too girly for this page, interestingly enough. And I used these wood veneer tweets a lot, making sure they always were checking out the ocean view (heh).

 

Let me just say right now that I am a slave to the visual triangle. If you wonder how to add embellishments, add them in clusters in three parts of the LO: near the title, near the journaling, and near the focal point photo. In this case, the photo was the whole page, so I used that final cluster at the bottom to finish the triangle. And an interesting FYI: the Jillibean Soup "I will never forget" sticker I added because it was lying unused on my scrap desk for a while, and I decided just to use it on this page just to get it out of the way. Plus it seemed to fit thematically.

So how do you deal with vacation pages? Do you create a whole album? A mini? A photo album? Separate pages? Fess up: like me, do you have 3 or more vacations to scrap? :-)