(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

I’ve been doing some cleaning and sorting, after doing some home renovations. What struck me was how many interesting and…unusual postcards I have received from friends over the years. It’s partly my fault: I try to send interesting things to my friends too.

This post, and several more to come in the near future, will include some of the more unusual postcards I’ve received. The first two posts are entirely from the late 1980s and the 1990s. In a nod to Spinal Tap, the photo at the very top shows (of course) Druids at Stonehenge (1997).

One of my favourite travel experiences was visiting friends in Morocco for two weeks at the end of 1996 and the beginning of 1997. I even managed to ski while there! But I only had time to see a tiny fraction of what that country had to offer. Fortunately, as you will see, a steady stream of postcards allowed me to see other aspects of Morocco.

It is impossible to see everything in the world, but having friends send along some highlights and personal impressions is certainly a cost-effective and interesting way to cover places I’ve missed. And in some cases, I received postcards from places that I ended up visiting later.

I’m not going to name my friends in these posts. But I know many of them read this blog, so it will be interesting to see if these postcards tweak any memories (actual or misremembered) about sending them! I say “misremembered” because sometimes more than one of my friends has been to a particular place. I’m looking at you, Rome and Berlin!

As we advance further and further into the digital age, postcards are becoming more and more rare. But I still receive them regularly: a few of my friends share my affinity for postcards, and make a point of sending the odd and the incongruous whenever they travel. They even apologize when the only offerings are generic and conventional. (Or they don’t – see below).

Due to this quest for quirks, I suspect that my postcard collection is getting progressively stranger even though postcards are harder to find these days!

Finally…if postcards aren’t quite your thing and you would prefer some more conventional travel content, I will try to include links to previous posts that cover the same territory or theme as the postcards.