Traveling Vicariously: Postcrossing

Credit: Flickr Commons via Postcrossing

Don't remember now how I came upon this genius program, but it was just a few days ago.

Postcrossing:

"The goal of this project is to allow people to receive postcards from all over the world, for free. Well, almost free! The main idea is that: if you send a postcard, you will receive at least one back from a random Postcrosser from somewhere in the world. 

Why? Because, like the author, there are lots of people who like to receive real mail.
The element of surprise of receiving postcards from different places in the world (many of which you probably have never heard of) can turn your mailbox into a box of surprises - and who wouldn't like that?"

The coolest idea!  

Now that I'm back in a country where it doesn't cost a ransom to send a postcard (as it did in Caucasus Georgia), I've started sending weekly postcards from New Mexico to a couple of young family members in Missouri.

Wouldn't it be fun for a family young'n to get a postcard, seemingly out of the blue, from God knows where on the planet? So I signed up in Tim's name, and got the address for "his" first postcard recipient: A 19 year-old girl in St Petersburg, Russia! I've shipped off the first postcard from New Mexico. (BTW, it costs $1.05 to send a postcard from the U.S. overseas and there is actually a stamp in the $1.05 amount.) When she receives it, she'll enter a special code at the Postcrossing website (I wrote the code on the postcard, which Postcrossing had assigned to me), and then a random person will be assigned Tim's name and address to send a postcard to.

Another BTW ... there's another fun program called Bookcrossing. It's a formal program for what I like to do informally - release books to the wild.