Postcrossing Blog

Today’s spotlight comes from Evanscrew, a family of four from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They like hiking and have an unusual hobby called Letterboxing. Intrigued? Find out all about it on this week’s spotlight!

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

We are a family of four and I love finding activities that are fun for us all, but also activities that we can both learn from and give back to. We participate in a hobby called Letterboxing (see next question) and there is a discussion board on one of the websites for that hobby that is all about Postcrossing. That is how I learned of Postcrossing.
What got me hooked was how educational it is—not only do we receive interesting postcards, but we also enjoy the great notes that most postcrossers include on the cards. I share the cards with my children, we put a pin in our world map if the card comes from a new place, and we learn about the place on the card.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

We love to read, go hiking and biking, and explore new places. One of the best hobbies we have found that combines many of our loves is called Letterboxing. Clues may be found on the internet that lead you to plastic boxes containing a rubber stamp (often hand-carved) and a logbook. As letterboxers, we carry a logbook and family stamp representing our trail name. When we find a box, we stamp our stamp into the box’s logbook and the box’s stamp into our logbook then carefully close and rehide the box for its next finders. We love to find and also plant these boxes. It is very important to be careful when letterboxing—both to maintain the natural elements around the boxes as well as to keep the letterboxes themselves safe. People intending to try this hobby should read up on the generally accepted etiquette for finding boxes and teach their children (if there are any) as well!

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

This is the Main Post Office in Falmouth. There are several smaller post offices in Falmouth that we sometimes use as well. Several postal employees automatically take out the stamp for hand-cancelling the cards when they see me coming!

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

We love all of our cards!! We are active in the forum as well, and love seeing what people choose for us!
This is of the World Map we have hanging in our home where the children put pins to mark where our postcards come from.

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

Honestly, it gives me a thrill to choose cards and stamps that I think a person will enjoy based on their profiles. And what fun—that is all we know about that person—what is in the profile—yet for a moment in time we are connected to someone in another part of the world as we prepare the card, knowing it will travel a great distance and hopefully bring a smile! Receiving cards that have obviously been chosen based on our interests is a thrill as well—that someone we don’t know in a place we may never visit has taken time to think of us—how cool is that!

Kristin (aka Volvomom) is a schoolteacher in Massachussetts, USA who shares Postcrossing with her sixth graders. Here is what she had to say to our spotlight questions:

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

I found out about Postcrossing in the US magazine ReadyMade. I was hooked from the start! As a child I started off with pen pals, which evolved into hosting foreign exchange students. My family has hosted from France, Bulgaria, Russia, and Norway, to name a few. Postcrossing seemed like yet another way to make the world smaller.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

My main hobby is my eleven year old twin sons. They are the light of my life! Each card I send has two smiles, which represent my sons.
Of course, my username indicated my other hobby – Volvo cars. I’m passionate about Volvos. I currently am on Volvo #5. It’s at 131,000 miles, but I swear it will hit one million miles someday!

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

I have to give a big shout out to the staff at the Chelmsford Post Office. They’re great with the volume of mail I receive! I also have to thank my dad and mom, who pick up my mail when I’m not home!

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

I have two postcards that are my favorites, out of so many, it was hard to choose.

The first is from user Thaddee_Calisson. It’s a vintage Volvo ad. I have this card framed and hanging in my home. It’s classic – in French and a Volvo. What more could I ask for?

The second card is an official from Anna in Sweden. What’s unique about this card is it was part of three cards. The other two cards went as officials to other users – one in China and one in Finland. I loved that I was part of a world puzzle!

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

I love meeting people from all parts of the globe and hearing their unique stories. Each time I receive a postcard I am reminded of the human experience.

Is there anything that you are passionate about?

I am passionate about education. I am a Spanish teacher to middle school students. Next year I will be teaching a World Cultures class once a week, so if there are any other teachers in the Postcrossing world who would be interested in working with me on this project, please let me know! I strive to teach my students tolerance and understanding, as it is a necessity in today’s world. Postcrossing is helping me do that with them. Thank you for that opportunity!

Most people know the name of Charles Lindbergh. He was a great American aviator, most famous for being the first pilot to complete a solo non-stop transatlantic flight, from New York to Paris, in May 1927.

But did you know that before his transatlantic adventures, Mr. Lindbergh was also a U.S. Air Mail pioneer (and later one of its advocates)?

As a child, Charles Lindbergh had always been interested in the mechanics of cars and motorbikes, and so it came as no surprise that when the time came, he chose to enrol in University as a mechanical engineering student. A couple of years later though, he found his true passion for aeronautics, dropped out and re-enrolled in a flying school in Nebraska. He spent a few years studying, doing air tricks & acrobatics across the country, testing planes and finally training with the American Army Air Service. At 23, he was a already veteran flier, but since the army didn’t need pilots at the time, he was looking for a job elsewhere…

Meanwhile, the US government had been running some experimental air mail routes between different cities for almost 8 years. The results were good, but the government had no intentions of continuing expanding the Air Mail Service on its own… and so in 1925, the Kelly Air Mail Act was passed by congress, which allowed the private sector to bid on specific airmail feeder routes to the main transcontinental system.

And thus in October that year Charles Lindbergh was hired by the Robertson Aircraft Corporation to be the chief pilot on a Contract Air Mail route between St. Louis and Chicago, with 2 stops in Springfield and Peoria.
He started flying a modified war surplus de Havilland DH-4 biplane after swearing the Oath of Mail Messengers, which had to be changed to note him as a pilot instead of a mail messenger – you can see it here.

Lindbergh did well as an airmail pilot, achieving a remarkable 99% delivery efficiency even in the harsh conditions of the time (which included no proper equipment or landing facilities).

Twice during his work he lost control of the plane due to bad weather or faulty equipment and had to jump out of it, landing by parachute on nearby fields. On both occasions, his first priority upon landing was to locate the wreckage of the planes and secure the mail – like a good mail carrier would!

He continued to be a chief pilot on this Air Mail route until February 1927, when he decided to take part on the race for the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris… Well, we all know how he did on that adventure! :)

And although Charles Lindbergh never returned to the Air Mail career after winning the Orteig Prize, he kept on promoting the Air Mail services, by doing speeches on their behalf and carrying souvenir mail covers from international flights in his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis.

Credits: All photos by the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives collection on Flickr. Read more about Charles Lindbergh on his wikipedia page and on charleslindbergh.com.

In the 1830s, the United Kingdom and the United States started carrying mail bags by train on their normal routes. Then, some years later, George B. Armstrong, assistant postmaster at Chicago, came up with the idea of sorting the mail on the train, while en route to its destination, to save time. The Railway Post Office (or RPO) was born!

A Railway Post Office looked like a normal train car on the outside, but had a unique interior design, with movable cast-iron fixtures that held the mail bags for sorting. These could also be folded if space was needed, as the train wagons tended to get very crowded! They also had their own cancellation stamps used only on board, and a special hook to snatch a bag of mail on the towns where the train didn’t stop. You can a demonstration of its use here.

They became so widespread that in the 1880s, most passenger train routes in the US had their own Railway Post Office, allowing for a very efficient and speedy mail delivery. At the peak of their popularity in the 1940s, RPO’s were in use in over 9000 train routes, covering more than 200,000 route miles. In the next few decades though, the service would slowly decline and be replaced by airmail. The last Railway Post Office, which travelled between New York and Washington D.C., closed in 1977.

Railway Post Offices now live in museums around the world, and on these beautiful pictures by the Smithsonian Institution on Flickr.

Yvonne is a 64 y.o. grandmother in the U.S.A. and goes by FloridaGirl in Postcrossing. She has a soft spot for postcards with maps and nature, as you can easily see in her favourites. Here’s what she has to share with us.

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

I had saw that someone mentioned swapping postcards in another site. I went searching for where a site would be to do that. I found Postcrossing. What got me hooked was not just the official part of Postcrossing but also the Postcrossing forum when I discovered private swaps and saw that there were so many wonderful cards of places I’ve never seen. The people in the forum were so nice and I started to make friends. Also the cards spurred me to research places that were on the cards. I couldn’t just look at a photo and find it interesting, if it wasn’t clear to me what or where it was, I wanted to find out.
I do continue to do the official Postcrossing exchanges.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I love maps, rocks, bookmarks and for years I made quilts but I had to stop quilting. That’s when Postcrossing started. I have maps from many places in the US and some other countries (road maps) and have 5 world Atlases.

I also have a collection of rocks that my parents, other family members or I have found; and, some that I bought, for example, petrified wood from Brasil.

My children have been giving me bookmarks for years, since I read so much. I’ve gotten beautiful bookmarks from other postcrossers.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

That is me at my mailbox in front of my house.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

My favorite of the animals are wild cats. This is a great card for the tenderness shown by the lions and the fact that I received it as a get well card from a postcrosser who I’ve gotten to know.

I’ve come to love the beauty of the Julian Alps in Slovenia. This just one that showns how beautiful they are.

The Japanese have a beautiful way of showing off their cherry trees.

This one shows olive trees with wild poppies blooming around them. It is one that I think is especially pretty.