By Brandon Hill on April 1, 2019 • ( Leave a comment )

Cancun 2017: Currency and Ephemera

Usually at the end of each of our vacation albums I have a few pages that contain ephemera from the trip. Ephemera are the items that one collects from an experience, trip or special occasion to remind one of the event. This is ephemera that wasn’t necessarily tied to a specific event or a theme that is chronicled elsewhere in the album. Sometimes there are items that do belong to other spreads, but didn’t work to put on them.

For the spread above, on the left hand side we have the bus tickets from all the trips that we took on the bus (just $1 each way), some of the other wristbands that we had to have at various times on the trip, and the CD with the pictures from my son’s scuba diving experience.

The right hand page contains pesos – coins and paper that were left over from the trip. I normally try to make sure that I have at least one of each coin and paper note that are in good shape for the scrapbook. A while ago, for earlier projects I purchased coin pockets and paper currency plastic sleeves, and I used those on this page. The coin pocket page is held in place with brads. For the paper money I wanted to be able to see the other side in the future, so they are actually hinged in place (using the white brads you can see on the right hand side) so that they can be flipped to look at the other side. To do this one would have to slip the page out of the plastic page protector. There are 407 pesos on this page – which sounds like a lot until you do the exchange rate and realize that it is only about $20US.

This second ephemera spread contains (from left to right), the activities program from our resort (which is affixed to the outside of the plastic page protector so that it can be opened and read), our luggage delivery receipt from the hotel, our Mexican ID cards (which you have to have to leave the country), an informational book that came with our CD of pictures from Aquaworld, and the Cancun logo.

To the left is the final page from the album, and since it is at the back it is a single page spread. It contains a picture of the Cancun hotel strip that our hotel was on, our boarding passes, a luggage tag, and the “Heavy” tag that had to be put on one of our bags! We didn’t have a scale at the hotel so the bags were too heavy! Apparently we bought too much stuff while in Cancun. We took out a bag or our shampoo and suntan lotion and gave it to one of the locals who was standing nearby, and they let us through without having to pay extra for the bag!