On this past trip, I sent myself 35 postcards from Australia. Here’s some of them:

As usual I numbered the cards, and the highest is number 36 but one (number 20) never arrived. Does this card exist and is still in transit, or did I make a numbering error? I don’t know, and it’s difficult to tell based on the dates and messages on 19 and 21.

Most of the cards are vintage thanks to Sue giving me a bunch she had found in an antique store. We found almost no new cards on our road trip which was surprising since some of the places we visited (Katoomba and Dubbo Zoo) are tourist attractions. I suppose Australians no longer send each other postcards.

I sent us three a day, although I have no recollection of writing so many! One card describes the events of the day, and the other two are just random/funny events from that day or the trip in general. The above is an example, and if you’re wondering why I had the idea of including SHAZAM in the card your guess is as good as mine!

And none of those ten Chomp bars survived until the Japan flight, but rest assured I purchased more.

I do my best to vary the stamps I put on all the postcards I send, but I was very surprised to discover seventy different stamps on the 35 cards!

This was possible because I discovered (here at home) a stash of old Australian stamps that I brought with me. In addition the guy at the post office near the QVB in Sydney did his best to help me buy every different stamp they had in stock.

It is my experience that postal workers – in the US, Australia and Japan – are usually more than happy to entertain my requests to look at and buy as many different stamps as possible 🙂

There’s also the licensed stamp sets, of which I saw about a dozen in post offices while I was there. I used the stamps from the Avatar and Big Things sets, and if you look at your postcards you may see examples from both.

These cards will all be filed in my second ‘Australia’ binder with the hundreds of others I’ve sent myself from those shores over the years. As I’ve mentioned many times, these are my most treasured ‘souvenirs’ from my travels.

I’ll (probably) do a post about the Japan postcards as well, although we’re still waiting for a half dozen or so to arrive…