I love postcards. Sending them, receiving them, writing them — you name it, I enjoy it.

It turns out there is a name for this practice — deltiology, which is the study and collection of postcards. I saw this card during a New Years’ Eve game of Cranium:

When I travel abroad, I have a tradition — in addition to sending postcards to friends and family, I also mail myself a postcard from every country I visit. On the back I jot down highlights from that vacation. This serves two purposes: 1) to collect a stamp from each country, and 2) to chronicle fond memories from the trip.

Here is my current postcard collection, all sent from me to me over the past five years:

All except two are from countries outside the States. Minnesota and Hawaii made the cut because of a good friend’s wedding in the midwest and a really spectacular trip to the 50th state in 2012.

I started this tradition in 2009 on my trip to Peru. It was pre-Pinterest, so I’m not sure where I got the idea from; I don’t know anyone else who does it. And from then on I continued sending myself postcards — from the Galapagos (also in 2009), then SE Asia in 2010 (Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia), Canada in 2011, Hawaii in 2012, and all 15 countries I visited on my RTW trip last year.

It’s too bad I didn’t think of this all the way back in 2003 when I traveled outside the States for the first time to study abroad in the Netherlands during college. I visited 14 countries during my 4 months in Europe and have dozens of special travel memories captured on film, as this was pre-digital camera era. I’ve shared a bunch of them on Instagram during Throwback Thursday posts.

Back to the present… here are more pretty glimpses of my postcard collection:

I have a total of 24 — here’s all of them, over two photo sets:

And this is an example of one, from the 2+ weeks I spent in Turkey last December:

As you can see, it’s nothing exciting — just a bullet point list highlighting where I visited and noting my favorite places. It’s very ‘big picture’ without many details, but I love looking through these and remembering what I did in each country.

Since I’m a chronic over-sharer, here’s the entire collection from over the years, grouped together to keep this short. You can see how it evolved from very little information to the bullet point structure, which was necessary to accommodate everything I did over 2.5 months in Australia. Please note that my first postcard — from Peru — was written in Spanish. Oh boy, que interesante.

So that’s way more than you ever wanted to know about my esoteric postcard tradition!

My other travel tradition is to save currency from each country… more about that some other day.

Do you have any travel traditions? Do you buy a shot glass from each new destination or take a jumping photo at every landmark you visit? I’d love to hear about it.