During the November of 2007, my husband and I took our first trip to Europe together. It was a trip of good wine, good food, and good company that will live in our memories forever. In order to share our experiences with those we love, I decided to push the envelope, ditch the traditional scrapbooking, and create a digital experience site.

Using Our Digital Scrapbook

You can follow the timeline of our trip by clicking on the dots to the left side of the page. For each date, you will find digital artifacts of our daily experiences on the trip. Those include a blog entry, Flickr photos, and a Google map of the places we visited that day. You can click the home icon at the top to return back to this main page.

To the right on this main page, you will find some useful artifacts that we used over the entire course of the trip. The upper "widget" features two jukeboxes playing music that I assembled for our Burgundy and Tuscany wine-fueled road trips. There is also a downloadable personalized GPX tour guide of those regions. We uploaded this high-tech guide into our Garmin Nuvi, so that we could easily access interesting and pre-researched restaurants and attractions while we were driving. And finally, I included a del.icio.us stream of useful links to regional recipes, travel sites, and Strickland-approved restaurants.

At the bottom of many pages, you will see a stream of consciousness set of short phrases that were recorded over the course of our trip using a service known as Twitter. This service allowed us to use text messaging to send short updates about our trip to our family back at home, which allowed them to feel connected to us even though we were thousands of miles away.