If you're like most people, you take rolls and rolls of photographs on your vacations, and then once you get home these photos stay under your bed or in a closet stored in shoeboxes, never to be seen again. Why not bring them out and display them? Create a vacation memory book to store these memories.

Especially if you have young kids, record these fun memories before they are forgotten. Whether your family vacations are a weekend camping trip or your dream trip to Europe, make a vacation scrapbook to capture these memories. Why take rolls of photos only to keep them where nobody will ever look at them? When you first take these photos out of their boxes, you'll be surprised at how many vacation memories they bring back.

You can make a separate scrapbook for each vacation or leave room at the back of a large scrapbook to add pages for future vacations. If you take a yearly vacation as a family, you should keep these in the same book so that you can flip from year to year, watching your family grow up in the space between those cherished vacations.

To make a vacation scrapbook, first gather all of your vacation photos. Go through the boxes, and choose a selection of photos to use in your scrapbook. Keep in mind that you don't have to use everything! Pick the ones that recall the best memories of your trip. Choose the best photos, where everyone is smiling and in-focus.

Don't forget to save tickets, menus, and other memorabilia from your vacation, too. You can also write your vacation memories directly into the book, either handwritten or typed. These can add valuable details to the book, making it much more than just a photograph album. Years from now, these notes will bring back wonderful memories of your vacation.

When designing your scrapbook pages, don't forget that even the embellishments you use can evoke the setting of your vacation. Use a background page that looks like leaves, a beach, or the setting sun, for example. Choose background papers that match the tone of the photos you've selected, and make sure that the photos match the colors of the background as well. You can buy die cut embellishments that are shaped like everything from a tent to a beach pail to add interest to your page.

Once you have your background papers, embellishments, and photographs selected, now it's time to arrange the photos on the pages. When designing the layout of your album pages, keep in mind that it doesn't have to be in chronological order. You can also group your photos around a theme. For example, you can place all of the beach photos together in your album. There is no wrong way to assemble the pages of your book, so be creative!

Vacation scrapbooks are a great way to get your photographs out of their storage boxes and display them. Looking back through the scrapbook years after your trip, you'll be able to recall wonderful memories of your vacation.