Armchair Travel By Postcard, or how to feed your wanderlust obsession while at home

Do you love receiving snail mail still? I do. Especially when it comes in postcard form from foreign countries! Postcrossing is bringing the world together one postcard at a time! All you need is a few postcards, the internet, and of course some postcard stamps and you can be well on your way to making friends all over the globe…sort of. Confusingly, Postcrossing provides you a send-to address while providing a different person your address, so you don’t actually exchange postcards with the same person you send one to. This means you’re not exactly exchanging notes, but more like sending interesting facts about where you live and what your life is like out into the world. I happened upon Postcrossing one day while on the search for services similar to Bookcrossing (which I’ve had no luck with yet, have you tried it?) and gave it a whirl. Postcrossing allows you to create a profile where you can list your interests and postcard subjects you’d like to receive. Naturally, having a weak spot for Medieval castles and literature, I asked for senders to tell me something interesting to see in their area in case I visit some day, especially if there’s a castle or literary site I don’t want to miss. One by one as I sent postcards, my PO Box began to fill with postcards from all over and so many had castles! It seems Postcrossing is quite popular in Germany because the majority seemed to come from German senders, but they have castles, so I don’t mind! Also, I never would have thought of going to Malaysia, but now I’ve got a little more information about it than I did before.

While these Postcrossing senders wrote to me about walking their dogs daily on the grounds of these castles, I couldn’t help but be a little jealous. But let’s be honest, when the sun comes out, where I live is BEAUTIFUL. So I send postcards out telling my receivers about hiking near a glacier like it’s no big deal.

And then I tuck my growing postcard collection away in a box for a rainy day when I feel the need to sooth my wanderlust desires. One of these days I’ll pick one out and start planning a visit.

*This post is not in any way affiliated with Postcrossing. I just thought it was cool and wanted to share!

Your turn. Everyone has SOMETHING cool about the location you live. What’s yours? If I were to visit, what’s the one place I should be sure to see? Tell me about it in the comments below!