Postcards are a forgotten but fun way to create connection when you’re traveling, even if they have their challenges.
I stared at the rack of postcards in a souvenir shop during my first day in Amsterdam, trying to figure out which ones best represented the magnificent Dutch city to me. Who are these for? I wondered. Who is buying these? I didn’t wonder that because I don’t like postcards or think they’re stupid; quite the opposite (the answer to those questions is: me). But I knew it might not be easy to figure out the logistics required to actually post the cards, to deploy them according to their design and purpose. Even back in America, it wasn’t always easy, which is a shame because postcards are a travel activity with a lot of potential for human connection.
My dedication to sending postcards began as a way to let my grandparents know I was thinking of them through the last years of their lives. When I had occasion to travel, usually a professional conference or a short trip with friends, I’d keep an eye out for a good postcard. Once I found one, I’d send two copies, one to my grandparents, and one to my parents. If Mom and Dad confirmed receipt, that was a good sign that the mailbox I picked wasn’t a dud and Grandma and Grandpa had received theirs as well.
After they passed at the end of last year, I didn’t see any reason to stop sending postcards. If anything, I could expand the operation. My recent trip to Europe, my first time on the continent, provided the perfect opportunity. The itinerary: four days each in Amsterdam and Paris, both solo, and then joining a group for a trip through southern France, most notably to the Catholic pilgrimage sites of Rocamadour and Lourdes. I sent a total of 11 postcards to four addresses back home. It reminded me why I like doing this, and the unfortunate barriers that likely keep a lot of postcards unsold on shop racks.
If you sit down to write a postcard, you might be quickly daunted by how little space there is to write about your trip. But take this as a feature, not a bug. Limitations are the fuel of creativity.
The first and most obvious benefit of postcards is that your friends and family enjoy two things: hearing about your travels, and receiving handwritten letters from you in the mail. Postcards are an efficient way to do both. If you sit down to write a postcard, you might be quickly daunted by how little space there is to write about your trip. But take this as a feature, not a bug. Limitations are the fuel of creativity. How could I distill my time in Rocamadour for its postcard? Maybe by talking about a “rose” and a “thorn”: the beautiful old chapels that I loved, and the local, barnyard-tasting goat cheese that I hated. Your postcard can take the generic but welcome approach of mentioning a highlight experience, it could play to your recipient’s sense of humor or a shared inside joke, or anything in between.
Postcards also encourage creativity in the variety of places and things they feature. If you think about sending postcards, you might imagine travelling to a city, and sending back a postcard featuring that city. And that’s always welcome. But don’t limit yourself to that, because the postcards don’t. Instead of sending a cityscape scene for the Paris leg of my trip, I picked a favorite Monet painting that was featured in the Musée d’Orsay. Any major art museum will be selling postcards of art in their collection. In Cleveland, at a conference, I found the opportunity to buy postcards of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, where the conference hosted a social evening. Restaurants, cafés and bars, in my opinion, are a very underexplored avenue for postcards. A favorite café near my office, now sadly out of business, stocked postcards among its merch, so I mailed a few and kept one to remember it by. Grünauer, an Austrian-German restaurant in Kansas City’s Crossroads district, delivered the check on a beautifully illustrated postcard featuring itself. I promptly mailed it to my grandparents.
Postcards are also efficient as souvenirs. On this European trip, I had almost no luggage room to spare for three-dimensional gifts for myself, let alone friends and family. But postcards? Those save space, and you’re supposed to get rid of them (mail them out) before you come back.
One unexpected benefit of postcards: maybe you’re not a great travel photographer! I’ve been assured that the photos I took in Europe are good, but even while taking some of them, I knew that I wasn’t capturing the beauty of the places that my eyes were seeing in the moment. Where the photography of the postcards was good, they became a way of communicating the grandeur of a place to a degree that I couldn’t with my phone’s camera. Unfortunately, sending a postcard is typically not as easy as it should be. You need three things to send postcards: the card, appropriate postage, and a drop-off point. As I noted, the cards are the easiest. The second, postage, isn’t too difficult if you’re travelling and mailing domestically, especially because you can buy it ahead of time. In Europe, the logistics game was more difficult to play. In Amsterdam, the first souvenir vendor I asked had international postage. In France, most vendors didn’t have it, so I visited a post office while in Paris and lucked out in Lourdes with a vendor who asked if I needed stamps to go with those postcards. The final piece, a drop-off point, shows an eerily similar situation between America and Europe: postal services have degraded and are simply scarcer now. But Google can help you find mailboxes or post offices, and again I got lucky in Lourdes when my hotel could mail my postcards for me.
You’ll also experience returning home faster than your postcards do, not least because you’ll likely wait to mail them until you have experiences to write about. Internationally, this delay is magnified. My European postcards spent time in the system ranging from 11 days to over three weeks. But don’t wait to get home to mail them if you can avoid it! My grandfather once noticed when I sent a postcard with a postmark that didn’t match. That’s when I realized that postmarking cards from the location you’re visiting is part of the postcard magic. It’s sort of like a passport stamp (which I didn’t get in Europe. Thanks, EU Entry/Exit System). It says: you were really there!
Despite these issues, I hope you’ll try sending a postcard or two on your next trip. There’s a lot of potential in them to create connection, particularly with friends and family you don’t talk with all the time and who wouldn’t be the first to receive the pictures you send in texts and emails. Even if they’re close contacts, who wouldn’t appreciate the effort you made to brighten up their mailboxes? It’s another way we can show we’re thinking about each other.
*For bonus effort points, try reviving your grade school cursive.
