Yay! I’m one of the lucky recipients of a postcard from The Snailr Project, brainchild of Anna over at little.red.boat. The card arrived this morning having taken almost a month to get here from somewhere in Texas.

Anna’s idea was that as she was doing a long (like 2 week) circular train trip round the US she would send random postcards to random volunteers to build up a sort of travelogue – except any one person got only one snapshot. In Anna’s words:

One journey of almost 7000 miles, six new cities, eight trains, fifteen days, and every vignette, observation and fractured bitty-bit of the travelogue broken up and sent as status messages the old way. By postcard. To a bunch of random people who asked for one. Because travelling slowly is nice. And so is leaving a trail to see where we have been.

Anna used a standard postcard, so she could prepare them in advance and not rely on local supplies.  She then customised each card with description, drawing, or whatever along the way and posted them whenever a mailbox hove into sight.

He’s the card Anna sent me from somewhere in Texas, just after they had been involved in a train crash on Friday 10 September!

The caption to the map (which shows Anna’s route in red and the location with a * and snail logo) says

the snailr project isn’t injured. At all. Not even for insurance.

And the main text reads:

After the train had juddered to a sudden halt, and we pulled to a stop with one side half of a big, silver, grain truck (the front half) on one side of the train, the back half on the other, the rush around to find out who, if anyone, was injured, began. What a dreadful sentence. Sorry. Basically, we were ordered back to our seats and eight sets of people – first Amtrak staff, then paramedics, fire fighters, policemen, walked through the train asking if everyone was OK. They said they were. But half an hour later when people started talking to each other about later claims, all manner of injuries started appearing.

You can find Anna’s pictures from the trip with some commentary at snailrproject.com and also on Flickr.

I’m looking forward to the book of the postcards of the journey!