I just vacationed without Instagram and wish I’d done it sooner

For about half of March, I was away from work on a family vacation. We took a cruise through Spain, Morocco, and Portugal. It was a lovely time, and I used my Google Pixel 9 Pro — easily one of the best camera phones you can currently buy — to document the whole trip. All the photos you see in this article come from the phone!

Typically, many of the photos and videos I shot on this trip would have ended up on my Instagram profile. However, for reasons I won’t bother going into (although I’m sure most Americans reading this will know), I shut down all my Meta-owned accounts earlier this year. That made this cruise vacation the first time in the past decade that I’ve gone on a huge trip and haven’t posted about my experience on Instagram or even social media in general.