When I checked the site today, I realized that all but one of the photos I'd attached to the Summer Vacation story were missing. Not sure what went wrong, but I uploaded and saved them again. Hopefully they'll stay in place this time!
The story behind TheGreenBag.com is only told in part through the Summer Vacation story. The site explains the bag, but not itself. Back in 1999, my cousin Rebecca swiped The Green Bag right from under everyone's noses, then took her mystery pictures the rest of the week. But she didn't know that my wife, Teri, had spotted her with the bag. So when we got home from our vacation, we registered thegreenbag.com. (Registering domains in 1999 was still kind of a big deal.) We started sending emails to Rebecca from "greenbag" at that domain, proving that we knew she was the culprit. Our whole family is just tech savvy enough that she wasn't sure it was us, but she started feeding us the photos to post on the website. Soon the whole family was involved, not really sure who had stolen the family gag gift and who was operating the site, or if it was the same person. It actually all went on for a couple of weeks before all of the truth came out. We've held onto the domain ever since, although the website had been rebuilt a few times in between.