Hawaii travel book with my Recollections Journal

It's been a while since I last posted on my blog but wanted to post about my photo journal, smash book or scrapbook. Not sure what you would call it but to me it's a scrapbook.
I'm hoping to post about how I created each page and some of the elements I used. I bought a Recollections Journaling book, on sale, from Michaels. Most of the pages in the book needed to be covered with other scrap paper as the designs, for the most part, were not pretty. Now my book is twice as thick as when I started as there is at least two pieces of paper covering each of the original pages. If you decide to do one of these, or even a Smash book, I advise to keep the stuff inside to a minimum. I learned the hard way that too many sheets of paper and embellishments can make the books too thick and they won't close properly.
After searching the web for some ideas of how to get started on my book, I found no examples of the Recollections books. I guess they weren't as popular as the Smash books so people weren't buying or at least not posting them. This was the driving force for me to put mine online in case someone out there loved some of my pages and needed some inspiration. So my book is about my upcoming cruise to Hawaii. Yes, I said upcoming, as we haven't gone yet but my book is all finished. I decided I had a better chance of finishing a travel journal, and actually journaling in it, if I did it before the trip and I just had to add pictures and of course the commentary. This was not an easy task and I'm not even sure it will work. I guess we will see at the end of the vacation.
So my first page was my cover page. I should have taken a picture of the books pages before I put anything on them but I didn't.
I decided to embellish the cover page a bit and add some sparkle to the flowers and a title. I cut out the pink piece and used an EK Success punch to trim the edge. The little sayings throughout the book are from various sources but because I took most of them out of the original packaging, I don't know if I can help you with the names of the companies. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask and if I can help with sizes or souces, I most definitely will.

The blue My Story tag was made by me. I just used the My Story stamp from a set that came in a 12 x 12 package. I stamped the journaling lines on it and added a butterfly. The little words, BonVoyage, Passport and tourist were from a package of stickers I got from the dollar store. I used quite a bit of stuff from the dollar store. I love that they have so many of these packages to choose from  The little saying in the top left corner says, Every step of the journey is the journey. The cover page was easy and fast. Hope you enjoy the rest of the book.