With a new year around the corner people are thinking calendars. While prefabricated roller coaster calendars are readily available, there’s something infinitely more special about a custom calendar featuring photos that you yourself took. It brings back fond memories because you were there and the images are therefore very personal. Every year I create a custom coaster wall calendar through one of the online photo services that enable you to upload your photos and choose the months in which they will appear. I thought I’d share some pages from my 2018 calendar. (The quality of the calendar is much better than is evident from the photos I took from my phone.)
Photo by Bobbie Butterfield
Photo by Bobbie Butterfield
Photo by Bobbie Butterfield
Photo by Bobbie Butterfield
What’s your take? Have you ever ordered custom coaster calendars and if so did they come out as well as you had hoped? And a bonus question: can you identify the coaster for January?
Joel
Custom calendars are a great idea! I’ve dabbled with the idea, but I don’t think I’ve ever ordered one. Do you recommend the site that you used to create yours? If so, please share the name.
As far as the January photo, I’m kind of stumped. I’ll take a stab in the dark: Expedition GeForce (but I don’t think you’ve ridden that). Hmmm…
Bobbie
I do recommend the site from which I ordered my calendar and was initially going to mention it but didn’t because I didn’t want to turn this post into an advertisement for Shutterfly.
Re the January photo, you’re right that I’ve never ridden Expedition GeForce. If someone else doesn’t come up with the name of the coaster soon, I’ll give you a hint which will make it easy.
GEEEET DUNKED ON
GO RIDE THE DAREDEVIL AT SIX FLAGS OVER GEORGIA!
John
I love this Bobbie! I’m going to have to drop a heavy hint to my family that I’d love for them to take some of my pics and create one of these for Christmas next year!
Bobbie
Glad you love this, John! Choosing the photos and uploading them is almost as much fun as actually having the calendar.
John
For January, I’m going to go with Fahrenheit at Hershey Park as my guess!
Bobbie
Nope. Because this coaster is probably somewhat obscure I wouldn’t necessarily expect anyone to come up with it. So I’ll give you and Joel a clue that will make it easy. The coaster is in the same park as one of the other coasters featured. (And there’s a reason why the track is partly red and partly green but you’d have to know the park to know the reason.)
Judy P in Pgh
A few years ago, a coaster friend of mine got me started with ordering pre-made roller coaster calendars. Each year, I would search for the calendar that had the most coasters that I had ridden or that I could at least identify. Even with plenty of searching, I could never find a calendar that had a cover and 12 months’ worth of coasters known to me. Two years ago, I decided to make a Shutterfly calendar for that very same friend, only this time, it would be MY top 12 coasters. The cover had a fun photo of the two of us together at a park. I was also able to scatter photos of us throughout the calendar, making it very personalized for him. Bobbie’s sample pages are single photos, whereas mine have multiple photos of a specific coaster or park. I just returned from Dollywood to find the calendar I had created for this year in my mailbox! It is titled,”2018 Most Intense Wooden Coasters,” an idea I had gotten from one of Bobbie’s recent posts on this blogsite about intense coasters. I am unable to post any photos here, but I can add some to the Coaster Critic Facebook page once a related post has been made. Along with my own calendar, I also received one that I had made for a new coaster friend, a person whom I have not yet even met! It was fun to chat online with him in order to develop his calendar, which, by the way, was free from the company. They do offer frequent discounts on items and/or shipping along with occasional freebies! This same company has a wide variety of products that can be personalized with your own photos and information. I have been retired a little over two years now and have generated 16 books in addition to multiple calendars. I find myself taking many more cell phone photos in the parks now that I know can easily use them to create fun and meaningful gifts for friends, family and myself. I am currently trying to meet a 3 AM deadline to finish a calendar for my mom as that is when the current discount offer expires. Once I started to create my own calendars, there was no going back!