I reccomend WebHosting UK. I host my websites with them. They may not be THE cheapest, however they are, in my opinion amoungst the best.
I have an affiliate link:
http://www.webhosting.uk.com/affiliates/idevaffiliate.php?id=460
and a non-affiliate link:
http://www.webhosting.uk.com/.
It'd be cool if you'd use the Affiliate link - It helps me out, and doesnt cost any extra for you. But meh, If you dont want to, then that's OK!
Once you've got your hosting, there would be a quite a few things you could do...
You could
a.) Use HTML/Dreamweaver to code your website yourself. The advantage of this is that you could get everything JUST how you wanted it... The disadvantage is that you'd need to learn HTML, CSS and perhaps Javascript to do the job well.
b.) Use a CMS like Drupal or Joomla. You could make pages with these software packages, and you wouldnt need to be a programmer to do it. However, it might not be quite what your looking for... While you can blog with Drupal, Joomla etc, they are not MADE for blogging with... Nor are they made for displaying images. You can get plugins for most CMS's, however it can be annoying having to update each individual plug-in when a security update is released - The more plugins you have/use, the more likely it is for your site to break
.
c.) If you just wanted to show off your pictures, you could use a script like 4images or Gallery2. Gallery2 is very good in my opinion, and is quite easy to use/manage. You can have different categories for different sorts of image..
d.) You could install Wordpress, which is a blogging script. You could update the blog with the details of your trips etc. You can include images with your blog posts, however I wouldn't use Wordpress on it's own if your going to be dealing with a lot of photo's.
I'd personally use a combination of Wordpress and Gallery2. You could upload your pictures with Gallery2, Write about them in Wordpress, and have a link to the the individual picture within each blog post.
There are even ways to integrate Wordpress and Gallery2 together (
http://www.easyjo.com/ has done this), however there's not point in talking about that until you've decided what you would like to do