Basic Premise: 

So much of the early evolution of travel writing was in the form of collected letters home to family or loved ones. We now communicate in shorter, punchier ways, and the idea of the travelogue or documenting a journey is affected by that. I like the idea of taking the idea of describing what you’re seeing directly to one other person, and combining it with the idea of social media - of firing missives and messages and status updates out  around the globe to random strangers and whoever elects to receive them.

The plan

So the trip is 15 days in duration - 14 days on the actual road - and I announced on my blog (and here) that if people want a postcard, they should let me know, and send their postal address to me by email (update: email address rescinded due to more than enough - thank you! - snailr sign ups. Snign ups? No, that’s awful) - I won’t do anything with it apart from one postcard, I’ll then shred all the addresses. Obviously I can only afford so many stamps, so I’ll cap it at about 10/15 a day. I’ve printed enough customisable postcards for just over that.

I’ll use the postcards to capture a single vignette, overheard snatch of conversation, observation or thing that I’ve noted along the way. And then I’ll post them off to people as I go along. I’ll keep a photograph of the card, and a typed transcript of whatever I wrote on it.

The idea is that, when pieced together, the messages would form an overall picture of the journey, and have some kind of travel narrative - in actuality, they’d just be spread across the globe. Short pieces of a longer journey - updates and glimpses like you would get from twitter, but personal, and tangible, an individually just a snatched moment out of context.

I’m certainly not claiming to be more interesting than anyone else: we all dip into and out of each others lives this way all the time. I’m just offering to send you a postcard.

That’s it, really.  I’ll be explaining other bits of the whys and wherefores on this tumblr as we approach the trip.