She’s sent postcards to herself for over 40 years. Here’s what she’s learned
Debra Dolan was 21 and on her first solo trip when she first sent a postcard to herself.
It was 1979, and Dolan, who grew up in central Canada, was visiting Vancouver for the first time. She was immediately blown away by the city’s vibrancy, and the beauty of the surrounding region.
“It was the first time I’d ever really seen mountains and the ocean such as this,” she tells CNN Travel today.
Dolan wanted to capture the joy she felt when she looked out at the towering Vancouver skyline and the nearby soaring mountains. But although she was usually a keen diarist, Dolan was swept up in the excitement of the trip, and found she barely had a spare moment.
“I thought, ‘I don’t have time to write in my journal.’ And I didn’t travel with a camera,” Dolan recalls. “So when we went to Whistler, or Vancouver Island, or saw places in Vancouver, I decided, ‘I’ll just send a postcard to myself.’”
On the back of each card, Dolan scribbled a paragraph or two about her impressions, thoughts and feelings, and then mailed it to her home address, signing off each dispatch with a single heart.
Some 10 days later, Dolan returned home to a stack of postcards from herself. Receiving them, recalls Dolan, was “an absolute joy.”
Dolan had grown up writing letters to various pen pals, but there was something different about writing to herself – knowing the contents were for her eyes only. She already sensed the postcards would serve as time capsules of a place and a moment.
Debra Dolan was 21 and on her first solo trip when she first sent a postcard to herself. It was 1979, and Dolan, who grew up in central Canada, was visiting Vancouver for the first time. She was immediately blown away by the city’s vibrancy, and the beauty of the surrounding region. “It was the…