Anna Pickard, of Little Red Boat, has been on a quite mammoth Amtrak trip round the US and rather than blog about it (cos that’s, like, so 2008) she hit on the idea of sending updates to random people on postcards. She called it Snailr. Which is rather brilliant. I immediately volunteered to be a recipient.
My postcard arrived today.
YAY!
You can read the postcard yourself on Flickr, but because I am a good girl and believe in accessibility, I will transcribe.
This is postcard number 37.
“We fell on dinner in New Orleans like we’d forgotten what real food was. To be fair, after two and a half days solid on the train (albeit one with no food after one meal caused food poisoning – go Amtrak!) we pretty much had. Amtrak food – and the menu is virtually identical on every train – seems to be made of plastic, puree, preservatives and microwave friendly parts.
Suddenly we were presented with ACTUAL food made of actual real live ingredients and not just chemical substitutes for such. I almost cried into my black bean & green tomato salsa. But it was gone too fast.”
Los Angeles: food
LA-New Orleans: not food
New Orleans: lots of AMAZING food
New Orleans-Memphis: meh
Memphis: lovely food
Memphis-Chicago: not real food
Chicago: almost certainly great food [this card is postmarked Chicago, presumably written prior]
Chicago-East Glacier Lake: dubious matter
East Glacier Lake: OK food
EGL-Seattle: ugh
Seattle: YAY food
Portland: nom nom food
Portland-San Francisco: whatevs
San Francisco: food
“the snailr project is going to get home the size of a bus”
This is what the Snailr postcard looks like amongst the others on my fridge. This is my fridge. Say hello to the ironing board hiding to the left of it.
YAY! This is lovely. Oh god, I am dreading to think what I wrote on some of these cards. I got a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing after a while. This is a lovely, lovely thing you have done for me, though. Yay!
What a brilliant idea! Love it.
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The idea of random postcards is quite fun – have you tried http://www.postcrossing.com/ at all? I sometimes use it to get my postcarding fix if I’ve a lengthy break between holidays.