Slow boat from Cuba
Finally! Brian, in California, reports that my postcard to him mailed from Cuba has arrived!!! I had actually given up all hope, given that most people I asked reported that postcards from Cuba to North America and even Europe usually arrived by a month after posting. (Granted, many of them would've been posting from Varadero or Habana, and we were in very rural Las Tunas.) I guesstimate, assisted by Google Earth, that the postcard took approximately 2.5 months to travel about 8850 km, or 5500 miles. That's one of the shorter trips the cards I sent will (or won't) take, believe it or not, so it makes sense it'd be one of the first to arrive.
Even if this is the only one that arrives, my faith in the Cuban postal system - and the US postal system - will have been bolstered.
ronnie
Labels: vacation
posted by ronnie at
8:34 p.m.
4 Comments:
My postcard also arrived yesterday. I note, however, that it was postmarked May 29, which was about, what, six weeks after it was mailed? Maybe that was just before it got on the boat to wherever mail goes before it comes to the US of A. I assume there was an intermediate step, of course, like Mexico or ... Canada?
I'm not about to accuse the Worker's Paradise of too much however. Back when I was in high school, we took what turned out to be my only trip to Europe, and, when we toured the Irish Sweepstakes, they gave us free postcards to send to friends back home. That got me off the hook with a few people, I thought. One set of friends who were particularly not-affording-to-go-to-Europe had ragged me mercilessly about the trip, and then, when I returned, began to rag me mercilessly about having forgotten them while I was over there. They took particular delight in deriding my claims that I had, indeed, sent them the promised postcard.
A very, very long time after, the card arrived. I don't know if they were more pleased to have been remembered, or annoyed to have lost a way to bust my chops.
Anyway, I knew you remembered, dear. But now I can't accuse Alberto Gonzales of stealing my mail!
May 29? Wow. Yes, you're right about the delay between posting and postMARK... it is not beyond my ken, having seen the infrastructure, that they could have taken up to six weeks to get from Las Tunas to their point of departure from Cuba (which logic would suggest was Holguin, the closest airport, but experience would suggest could be Habana, at the far end of the island).
Anyway, I'm just happy that my northernmost American correspondent has gotten a postcard as well... bodes well for the other Yanks as well as my Canuck penpals.
ronnie
... and mine arrived today (June 15th)way out here in the Lotusland of California! It brought me a great description of dark Cuban skies. It also brought me a bad case of penmanship envy -- good grief, ronnie, your writing is so precise that it looks like you use a font of some sort.
Thank you!! (And mine was postmarked May 29th, also.)
LOL Sherwood, that was written on the beach, reclining in a lounge chair with the postcard balanced across my knees! Never underestimate the literally :( hard-earned benefits of being taught penmanship by Nuns who cracked rulers across your knuckles if you're sloppy!
I did think of you when looking at that foreign night sky. The North Star rose a little ways onto the horizon the week we were there and then set again by 10 o'clock or so. It made our sky seem darker in a way than we were used to at home - something definitely missing! But as I mentioned on the card, out there in the middle of nowhere, at the undeveloped end of the island, with almost zero light pollution, the stars were *amazing*.
I think that's all my US cards delivered - now we'll see if my Canadian family & friends get theirs.
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