Snail mail - or another exercise in patience.....

One of the less straight forward aspects of Expat life is maintaining contact with people and hobbies back home.  Our family reads voraciously, but English reading material is hard to come by and is quite limited in variety.  We have a network the accumulates our snail mail and forwards it to us.  This is effective, but can be quite slow.  We are only now (Feb 6) reading our Christmas cards most of which were mailed in mid December.  Flyers and catalogs are typically expired before they get to us.


For example, a friend from Manitoba sent me copies of a couple books he'd written and had published as a Christmas present.  They were post marked in Lynn Lake MB Dec 18, 2014.  They arrived here in near perfect condition, but the books had had quite a journey. Lynn Lake MB to Wimborne AB via Canada Post, where they languished for a time, waiting on enough mail to accumulate to justify a mail dump, Greyhound to Cowtown where they languished a week waiting on a decision whether to have them and the other mail hand carried over by the next person bound this way, or sent via international courier, FedExed from Cowtown office to regional office in Ankara, Turkey, then forwarded by Yurtici Cargo (local courier) to Gellibolu. The local courier called me at 10:30 this morning. I was home with the package before 12:30.... Hmmm, I wonder if MapQuest can add up the distance?....

Well, MapQuest wasn't much help ( intercontinental distances and Turkish language defaults complicated that issue). SWAG will have to do...

Lynn Lake to Wimborne +/- 1100 km
Wimborne to Cowtown +/- 150 km
Cowtown to Ankara Turkey +/- 600 kph x 13 hrs = 7800 km
Ankara to Gellibolu +/- 700 km
Gellibolu to Saros 35 km

Total estimated distance 9785 km, or 6116 miles via pick up truck, car, bus, truck, train, and airplane. Of course, not including how KOO might have made the trek to the post office in Lynn Lake - like the antique Famous Black Cat for instance.....