New Tradition: Travel Map!

I think that an integral part of building a new household and family is developing your own traditions. Making my own traditions with Garrett and my other family members as an adult is something that I'm really looking forward to as we get older.

If I recall correctly, Garrett and I have had one on-going tradition thus far: I get him a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream every year on his birthday. This started our freshman year of college (God knows how I got my 18-year-old hands on a bottle of Bailey's); we hadn't been dating that long and I was unsure of what to get him. I'm not sure how I settled on the creamy whisky liqueur (there were other small gifts, too), but it stuck. Seven years later, he still receives an annual bestowment of Bailey's come his birthday.

I wanted to develop a better, more sentimental tradition with my husband than giving him a bottle of booze every year. So, from adapting the ideas of others, I decided that we should make a Travel Map.

Our Travel Map is exactly what it sounds like: a world map upon which we mark our travel. Garrett came home with a framed map from a garage sale some time ago and it's been hanging in our dining room ever since. It's a good map, but obviously not the most expensive one, and though it's framed, it isn't glassed-in...a.k.a. PERFECT for a DIY project!

Last night, on the eve of our 1st anniversary, Garrett and I marked all of the places that we had traveled to in our first year of marriage. We decided to use pins (stickers, sharpies, thumbtacks, etc. would work the same) to mark our destinations. It was a little hard to not mark everywhere we'd been in the past almost 7 years of being together, but we opted out on that because this will be one of our new marriage traditions. We used pink pinheads to mark this year's travel (Garrett marked the few destinations he'd been without me with green), and will use a different color for every year of our marriage. I can't wait for the pins on this map to multiply!

Our Travel Map!

As you can see, Garrett and I were pretty lucky in our travels this past year. We started with our wedding in Newport, Rhode Island and from there traveled on to Bozeman, Montana, San Francisco and Half Moon Bay, California, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, back to San Francisco, California, then to Ambergris Caye, Belize, and, finally, to Los Angeles, California. We've also taken advantage of in-state trips to Tucson, Sedona, and Flagstaff. Garrett and I clearly love to travel and I'm glad that we will have this mapping tradition in years to come to reflect on all of the places we've been and how blessed we really are.

See pictures from our year one destinations below!

The start of it all...pictured outside of Ochre Court in Newport, RI on our wedding day.

Garrett fishing off the banks of the Yellowstone River in Montana.

The two of us in front of Half Moon Bay, photographed outside of the Ritz Carlton.

Picture taken at a friend's Christmas party in Michigan.

En route to Ambergris Caye, Belize by way of water taxi from San Pedro.

At a brewery in Pasadena, California.