Project Life 2013: June 19-21, Vacation Part 1: Trip to Great Wolf Lodge

Jessica's delay in posting her weekly Project Life blog hop over at the Mom Creative, where I like to link up, worked in my favor as I am also a day behind in getting my post ready to share.  Like last week's post, this one is also on the long side as it covers our first mini trip back in June.  It was actually kind of bittersweet getting them ready to share because I remember how at the time it seemed like we had the whole of summer stretched out before us and now it's coming to an end.

Vacation: Great Wolf Lodge, Page 1

We only spent one night at the Great Wolf Lodge but it takes up two double page spreads and half of another, along with three inserts!  Here is the first one giving an overview of the Lodge and location itself.  There are three inserts between these two pages in my album.  I'll show you those in a bit.

Left side has a title section at the top and some pictures from inside the Lodge.  I am not at all outdoorsy and I hated camping as a child.  There are lots of really cute camping lines out right now.  Since my daughter is always asking to go camping I told her this trip with it's outdoor lodge type theme was our version of camping or "glamping" if you like, and indulged my love of supply shopping by picking up a few themed papers and stickers to use especially for these pages.  These are mainly Imaginisce with a little Jillibean Soup thrown in.

I also tried to incorporate some memorabilia from the Great Wolf Lodge as well.  On the right side I used part of a tag from a toy we bought to incorporate the official GWL logo. On this side I added part of the MagiQuest brochure.  The camping stories card is for my daughter to add her own journaling on, something she's keen to do.  We have been working on her own Summer Fun type mini book the past couple months and now she's more and more interested in helping me with Project Life.

My son was just under two years old at the time of our visit and wanted noting to do with any of the costumed characters.  He was interested enough to hid behind a sofa in the lobby and peer around at them from time to time.  As the very end he consented to take a card from Wiley the Wolf, but still wouldn't take his picture with him. Both sides of the card are printed so I made a little envelope for it so we can still take it out.

Vacation: Great Wolf Lodge Inserts

This is the first page with all three inserts in the middle of the spread.  I had to trim down these super cheap and thin regular 8.5X11 page protectors (Target's brand - avoid, because they are terrible) as I was out of the nicer ones.  I can't stand the white and may end up redoing these.

We purchased this large postcard, which was really helpful because otherwise I would've had no idea what any of their characters were named and we saw each one during our visit.  On the blank side meant for writing I made a little mini page with my daughter meeting the three girl characters, the only ones she really cared about seeing.

The lodge life brochure you get upon check in and it has a map, essential numbers, etc inside the booklet.  I wanted to use it but I didn't want to see the girl's face printed on it each time I turned to this page.  To remedy this, I stuck in it backwards and put the activity guide facing the front so the photo of the characters is what you see when you first look at the page.

The third insert has two double sided travel brochures that I wanted to keep because they have good information about where we were and what you can do there.  These aren't precious to me, just a nice to have kind of thing.  So I just stapled them into place.  Both this insert and the Activity Guide/Lodge Life inserts were sealed with washi tape to fit the contents more snugly.

Vacation: Great Wolf Lodge, Page 2

Since the first spread was more of an overview of the Lodge with pictures of the lobby, our room, playing MagiQuest, etc. the second page is all about the actual water park. 

The Vacation is Awesome and the little stickers on this page are from Bella Blvd.  The first day I only had my daughter's inexpensive point and shoot digital camera so the pictures aren't the best.  I made up some photo collages so the picture quality, or lack thereof, wouldn't be as noticeable.  The bottom cards are both from the Honey core kit.  E still has to add her own thoughts.

I trimmed down one of our wristbands and included it on the page.

I went a little crazy and ordered more pictures than I really needed and rather than store them in a photo box I decided to add these full sized photos of my daughter on this side of the spread.  It worked out because they're all of the water park.  I resisted the urge to do too much embellishments and kept it simple so I could move on and get through documenting the trip.  The "Splish Splash" card is M&MBI.

Then because I added an extra page of photos and because of how I planned out the rest of the trip I had extra space so I filled it with more pictures that might not have made it into the book otherwise.  The top left picture of my daughter had some pictures of fellow waterpark visitors in the background so I covered them up with some label stickers.  The water pouring down reminds me of how the day before it had been strong enough to knock her clear over.  At the bottom are some pictures of the last thing we did before leaving, getting a cupcake at the Bear Paw.

Next week I'll have the second half of our trip up north to share.  We stayed in state or nearby this summer but I think by next summer I'll be ready to travel farther.  Do you have any recommendations for family friendly places you like to go?  Let me know if there's something out your way that we should add to our Must See Travel list!