A Day at a Time: Dreaming of Postcards!

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Dreaming of Postcards!

Anyone who’s been following along with my blog for very long, knows I have a bit of an obsession with postcards. I’ve always loved sending and receiving them—even when I was a child. Then, about 10 years ago, I discovered a postcard exchange website (called Postcrossing) that I decided would be perfect for our homeschooling geography studies. That’s when I really got obsessed. Suddenly I wasn’t limited to only friends and family who’d occasionally think of sending me a postcard when they went somewhere cool. I joined a community of bonafide snail mail lovers who enjoyed sending and receiving postcards as much as I did! I was hooked!

We used it as part of our homeschool geography for a few years, but the kids never got as into it as I did. Somewhere along the way, I embraced it fully as my hobby and haven’t looked back.

Now, my family knows that I will spend a part of every trip we go on, not only looking for postcards, but also places to buy postage and mailboxes to send them from. In the US, finding decent postcards is the hardest part. Usually I can find some in some quirky souvenir shop, but not always. I bring postage with me and just drop them off in the local post office. It’s usually easier to find postcards in foreign countries, but much harder to procure the correct postage and find places to send them from. I try to send postcards to family and friends from every stop on our journeys.

At home, it’s a different story. When life is calm, I generally send 5-10 postcards a week to people on postcrossing ( the postcard exchange website). Just for fun. I sign up for how many postcards I want to send, then get assigned that number of names/addresses. I look at their profiles and pick a postcard I think will suit them. When my postcard is received, the recipient registers the card, and my name/address gets thrown into the mix. So I receive postcards from different people than I send them to. I’m sure the mail deliverer is entertained by the stacks of postcards I sometimes have waiting for me in my mailbox!

Have I ever shown you my postcard files? No? Well, here they are in the drawers of my coffee table...

I've got them organized alphabetically by subject and can usually find what I'm looking for pretty quickly. You’d be surprised at the eclectic postcard tastes of some people on the postcrossing website, so my collection is also quite eclectic. From animals, to insects, to national parks, to books, to food, to weather, to vehicles, to bridges….it is a rare thing for people to stump me with their requests!

I also have this bin of random postcards --mostly from other countries --that don't quite fit into my other categories. This bin is a bit more disorganized, but it definitely has some treasures in there too!

Then there's my collection of received postcards, which is admittedly a little lame and not worth showing here on the blog. This may be heresy to some postcard collectors, but I actually weed out my received postcards pretty regularly and just keep my favorites.

Here is a sampling of my favorite kind of postcard to receive….

On my postcrossing profile, I call them artistic touristy cards and they make me very happy. They’re also my favorite kind to find when I’m traveling and I’ve been known to walk down touristy streets peeking into souvenir shop after souvenir shop looking for the “right” kind of postcard. Yes, I married a patient man! Haha!

I also love these Inge Löök Old Lady postcards that make me laugh every time!

This past week, I was very excited to start receiving a slew of texts from family and friends saying that the last batch of postcards from our Middle East trip were starting to arrive! It took 2-1/2 months, but they made it!