Packing List--#6 in a series

In an age of digital photography and digital e-mail, this is really old school, but be sure to pack the addresses of folks back home so you can send post cards.

Even though you'll probably get home before they arrive, people still love to receive postcards from beautiful faraway places. At least I do.

Postcards are a happy snapshot of a trip in progress and they let people know you're thinking about them--even if you're not thinking about them much--while you're off having the time of your life.

But to send postcards, you need addresses. Rather than pack your entire address book and risk losing it along the way, I would suggest deciding in advance who the folks are that you want to send cards to while you're on the trip and then writing or typing their names on sheets of paper that you keep with your photocopies of your passports and credit cards (see packing list item #3).

One cool thing about postcards is that there's not enough room on them to say more than "having a wonderful time, wish you were here", allowing you to be thoughtful without expending much actual thought or effort or taking more than a few minutes away from the fun you're having.

Teri and I always buy postcards on our trips--not just to send, but to keep too. Our theory is that if something happens to the camera, we'll still have beautiful pictures of the places we vistited. Think about it--postcards represent the best effort of a profressional photographer to capture a sight in its ideal light and perspective and at its most pristine.

Twice I've lost pictures on trips. I lost some pictures taken in Greece when a roll of film got soaked by shampoo. Lather, rinse, repeat doesn't work so well on film. Those pictures were of the changing of the guard and other Athens scenes.

On our trip to Vietnam, I came home with hundreds of pictures, but I lost the best fifty or so from the entire trip when I had them burned to a defective CD and then erased the chip to make room for even more pictures. We lost all the pictures of our overnight stay in a home in a tribal mountain village and a close encounter Teri had with a water buffalo in hiking to that village among other things.

I have the memories, but I still mourn those "lost" pictures and it's been over a decade since that trip to Greece.