And it taught me a couple of lessons regarding photography:
2) Batteries are important.
3) Online photo sites are a great way to share your vacation almost live.
Let's take these one at a time, with real-world examples.
Memory cards are gold and cheap
Every day we took photos. And every night I'd load up Adobe Lightroom and review the day's images, culling the bad ones and cataloging the rest. Since we had two cameras, we had two memory cards...only two memory cards.
As you can probably guess, I left one card in the laptop rendering one camera useless, unless we found another memory card. Luck for us, the Montreal Botanical Gardens stocked them. Back in the day, they'd have had rolls of film.
Lesson learned: Get more than one memory card per camera, and keep the extra cards WITH THE CAMERA. Memory cards with large storage capacity are pretty cheap these days, and unlike film, you can reuse them. It makes sense to have a bunch available to you.
Batteries are important
Now that kinda seems self evident, but yes, we'd only had one battery per camera. And we managed to leave one of those batteries at home. Again, rendering the camera useless -- until we found a 3rd party replacement at a camera shop.
Lesson learned: Carry a spare battery for each camera. And don't forget the battery charger! As we found out in conversation with store staff, it's usually the recharger that people end up forgetting.
Online photo sites...
I have a flickr pro account and used that as a place to dump my 'best shots' of the day. With today's social media integration this allowed my friends to follow my daily activities visually. Of course, you could set up a photo-blog too. We did that part way through the trip...and are now finally writing our posts on it to have an online album of our vacation.
Lesson learned: Your friends really do want to see what you're up to. We had a number of friends comment to us during the vacation. It was very cool to read their thoughts of our experiences, and to be able to share new images with them. It reinforced a sense of community, even when we were physically thousands of miles removed from it. Warm fuzzies all around.
I'll shut up now...
Ok, you've just seen a couple of examples of me being a bonehead, yet learning a thing or two in the process. Your turn. What has a vacation experience taught you the hard way. Share, and make us all smarter 
