Postcards, boarding passes, and the joy of the slow route

Happy 2026, friends.

I’m starting this year with a simple kind of gratitude. In 2025, I got to travel to places that still feel vivid when I close my eyes: Iceland, Italy, Mallorca and Cabrera, Prague, and so many other corners of the map, now living in my memory as light, weather, street sounds, and small rituals.

Some people collect magnets. Some collect museum tickets. I tend to collect rituals that refuse to be optimized. I arrive in a new place, by plane, by train, by whatever moving rectangle brought me there, and then I start looking for postcards and stamps.

It’s a habit that I’ve carried for a long time. Postcards have always played a role for me, not just as souvenirs but as a way to make travel social in a quiet, tangible way. Years ago, when I crowdfunded my trip to Antarctica, one way I thanked donors and sponsors was by sending them a postcard from there. It was a simple gesture, but it said something an update email never could: I was really there, and I was thinking of you from the end of the world.

Postcards fit the Boarding Today spirit perfectly. They make travel feel like travel, because they are pleasantly inefficient, delightfully analog, and stubbornly physical.

Why postcards still belong in your bag

A postcard does something your camera roll cannot. It forces you to choose one image and one message, then trust a real route to carry it. No edits, no algorithm, no promise of a longer story later that never arrives.

I wrote about this recently on my blog in Postcrossing postcard exchange: why I love it (and what it teaches me about data). In that piece, I describe postcards as a connection without noise, slow communication you can hold, and proof that anticipation is still a valid emotion. Travel already pulls you out of autopilot. Postcards keep you there.

The postcard mission

There is a specific kind of traveler who lands somewhere and immediately wants to find three things: a good stack of local cards, the correct stamps, and a mailbox that looks official enough to trust with your handwriting. It can make you look like you are working a case. You are not. You are simply trying to send a small piece of here to someone who is currently there.

And if you are doing Postcrossing too, it becomes even better. Someone might be a stranger who genuinely wants a postcard from where you are standing. I thought about it earlier: the internet promised global connection, but postcards actually deliver it, quietly, one address at a time.

Postcards are how I pay attention when I travel.

The sneaky benefit of sending postcards is that it changes how you move through a destination. When you know you will choose a card later, you start noticing what is postcard-worthy. You notice the particular color of morning light on stone, the typography on old street signs, the way a city sounds when you walk it before breakfast, and the tiny details you would normally miss while chasing the top ten list.

It becomes tourism with more intention and less scrolling.

How I actually send postcards while traveling

I learned quickly that stamps are easier to find when you treat them like a priority rather than an afterthought. If I see a post office, I go in. If I spot stamps at a museum shop or a bookstore, I buy them. Having postage in your pocket turns postcard sending from a plan into something you can actually do.

I also try to write early because the longer I wait, the more the postcard feels like a task. I like writing in a café, on a hotel windowsill, or on a train table while the landscape does its thing.

When it comes to the message, I keep it small and specific. In my Postcrossing piece, I called it friendly beats fancy. A postcard does not need poetry. It needs one human detail from that day: what I ate, what surprised me, what the air smelled like, or the tiny moment that would never show up in a guidebook.

And yes, mailboxes are part of the adventure. Some countries have drop boxes everywhere. Others treat them like mythical objects. Either way, you will remember the moment you finally find one.

Postcrossing, but make it travel.

Here is what makes this a travel habit rather than a vacation gimmick. When you travel and do Postcrossing, your postcards become tiny ambassadors of place. You are not just sending greetings from a landmark. You are sending an authentic slice of your route, your actual day, into someone else’s world.

That is why I keep returning to Postcrossing. It makes the world feel smaller without making it louder. It gives travel a satisfying completion loop that has nothing to do with likes.

A boarding pass gets you onto the plane. A postcard gets a piece of you off the route and into someone else’s day.

And weeks later, when you are home, when the suitcase is empty, when the trip is already starting to blur, you get the best kind of souvenir: proof that your journey kept moving after you stopped.

If that sounds like your kind of travel, you already know what to do.

Go find the stamps.