Geocaching Australia

Just randomly looking at peoples profiles on GCA and found postcrossing as a hobby.. WTF is postcrossing I asked.

"It's a project that allows anyone to receive postcards (real ones, not electronic) from random places in the world."

I find it strangely interesting. I can't be stuffed writing a postcard to family but writing to a stranger somehow intrigues me. I wonder what Freud would say ? Well I wonder what Freud would say about geocachers too. You could write a postcard to a stranger about geocaching !

http://www.postcrossing.com/

Pesky has set up a locationless cache that does just this.

Send Pesky a Postcard

cool - that kind of works perfect with the web-2-postcard service I normally use

just sent 3 cards

I blame Mundoo for getting me sucked into postcrossing! I discovered postcrossing via her profile & had a bunch of old first day cover maxi cards that were sitting around gathering dust, so decided to put them to good purpose. The nice thing is that I get a postcard back in return.

A couple of interesting things that have happened:
1. I actually received a postcard from Mundoo - she was randomly assigned my name to send one too - pretty amazing considering there are over 3000 postcrossers registered in Australia (albeit not all of them are active) & I have only received 9 postcards from Australians.
2. I met another postcrosser that sent me a card from Belgium - he came to Canberra for the Canberra International Walking Weekend this year.
The world is obviously a small place!!

I originally had a longer post but somehow it disappeared, so I've abbreviated the 2nd version!

Postcrossing you say? Yes indeed! Heading toward 500 sent now

Hitting up my stash of cards right this minute Pesky!

Now this really intrigues me too. More secret squirrel stuff!!!!

If anyone needs advice on a super cheap yet incredibly effective method of postcard storage, say aye.

Well, see, I looked at proper professional postcard pages - pricey! I figured out that for the 600 cards I had, with room to expand I'd end up paying just over $500 for pages alone. Stuff that.

SO! I took a trip to officeworks, bought a stack of cheap folders and 2 boxes of plastic page protectors (lotta p's in this post) and some dividers.

Add to this a glue dot roller (picked up at Coles) and I'm all set.

$74 later I have 10 folders, divided alphabetically, with country dividers within. I drop one card in the bottom of the plastic protector, then use the glue dots to hold two more on the sleeve above that loose one. Or if they're oversized or oddly shaped I just squeeze them in as I can. I'll take some photos tomorrow to illustrate what I'm saying because it's 11pm and I'm not sure I make sense at this time of night.

The glue dots are removable and scrapbook safe so they shouldn't do any nasties to the cards.

Frogglin wrote:Well, see, I looked at proper professional postcard pages - pricey! I figured out that for the 600 cards I had, with room to expand I'd end up paying just over $500 for pages alone. Stuff that.

SO! I took a trip to officeworks, bought a stack of cheap folders and 2 boxes of plastic page protectors (lotta p's in this post) and some dividers.

Add to this a glue dot roller (picked up at Coles) and I'm all set.

$74 later I have 10 folders, divided alphabetically, with country dividers within. I drop one card in the bottom of the plastic protector, then use the glue dots to hold two more on the sleeve above that loose one. Or if they're oversized or oddly shaped I just squeeze them in as I can. I'll take some photos tomorrow to illustrate what I'm saying because it's 11pm and I'm not sure I make sense at this time of night.

The glue dots are removable and scrapbook safe so they shouldn't do any nasties to the cards.

I do the same thing with all my postcards that i have from all my travels.

I blame mundoo too! LOL She infected me.

I'm a lover of randomness, and Postcrossing is a beauty at that.

Yesterday, mundoo and I attended the 10/10/10 geocaching event, but left early because we had to go to Rundle Mall to meet a group of Postcrossers for the first Adelaide Postcrossing Meetup. 3 ppl there from Q'ld / northern NSW! Boy, talk about keen.

I'm amazed at how many cards I get from overseas with the writer saying they are geocachers too.

One lady in USA I was in contact with through geocaching ... I can't remember how the correspondence was intiated ... asked if she could send a couple of TBs for me to release in Aus - I released at Wagga Mega - about a month later she drew my name (at random) at Postcrossing and duly sent me a postcard. Uncannily, coincidental.

So far, I've sent 238 'officials' and received 235. 47 different countries - sent to 36 countries, received from 41.

So I just wrote 3 postcards...