Back After Two and a Half Years of Silence

So, it's been quite a while since my last post in January 2013. So much has happened in my life, although not much has changed. Since then, I have been to a number of places, a number of which have, as the cliché expression goes, taken my breath away. I have also been to a number of countries from which receiving a modern cover of good quality is not so common.

One of my travel rituals, as you may have already guessed, is sending myself covers. I always try my best to frank them with stamps with my topics or, if that's not possible, with the most visually appealing stamps I find available at the particular post office I happened to stumble into. These covers chronicle my travels in a way the brings together two of my main interests, travel and philately, in a very personal way.

Starting with this post, I will be sharing scans of some of the covers I have been sending personally during my travels. I will be starting with my most recent trip, which was to the Western Balkans this summer.

I am quite satisfied (perhaps proud might even be the better word) of the outcome of most of these covers. I have managed to frank most of the covers myself, asking the postal clerks in the nicest way possible to hand over their stampers. It was often a silly affair, me having to pantomime stamping the envelope since sometimes they didn't speak English and I didn't speak the local language!

On this trip, I managed to send covers from Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. I also went to Greece and Austria on this trip, but felt these countries were not to uncommon, so I did not send from there.

Notice how mercilessly the German postal authorities slapped their tracking labels onto the registered letters, sometimes even directly on the stamps! In some cases, where it was still possible or perhaps implorable to do so. Thanks, Deutsche Post! (smirks)