Feature Blogging Archives - Postcard Jar Blog

Welcome to Postcard Jar (and 2024)

Ann — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 15:52:35 +0000

Welcome to Postcard Jar and happy new year! Whether you’ve been reading our blog for years, follow us on social media, or are brand new, we’re glad you’re here. Sharing our best tips for living and traveling well and helping you to take stress-free vacations brings us so much joy. Note: Postcard Jar is a reader supported blog and we have partnered with EF Go Ahead Tours. If you make a purchase through links in this post, we may earn a commission. This month, we returned from our biggest trip yet. It was a nearly two-month long vacation around the world. We drove from our home in Nebraska to Minneapolis. From there, we flew to Dubai, then cruised from the Middle East all the way to New Zealand and back to Australia. It was truly the trip of a lifetime. Stay tuned, as we’ll be sharing more about our adventures abroad very soon. For now, have a look at (below) at this postcard-perfect view of Whitehaven Beach in the Whitsundays. Absolutely spectacular! PIN FOR LATER What’s in store for 2024 Following the success our our first Postcard Jar Friends Cruise to the Caribbean in 2023, we’ve decided to host more […]

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It’s Postcard Jar’s fifth blogiversary!

Ann — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 13:47:14 +0000

Five years ago today, we sat in a lounge at the Doubletree Hotel in Rochester, Minnesota, and published our first-ever blog post on postcardjar.com. It was the day before I would undergo a procedure at the Mayo Clinic that would eventually diagnose me with a chronic inflammatory disease. Steve was still working as a middle school principal and we needed a little inspiration distraction in our lives. To date, that post has only been read 290 times. Yet five years later, our blog is garnering tens of thousands of page views each month, we are traveling to places we’ve never been, and we are making the most of midlife, despite my health challenges. We cannot thank all of our readers enough for following along on our journey and being so engaged with our blog. We love reading your comments, answering your questions, and getting your postcards in the mail. In case you’re new here or missed something along the way, here’s a look back at some of the highlights of our fifth year of blogging. Our trip to Italy We spent about a month in Italy and Greece last Summer, learning about wine production, eating pasta and spanakopita, and immersing ourselves […]

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Woo-hoo! Our updated travel blog is here!

Steve — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 15:46:30 +0000

After weeks of editing, cropping, categorizing and designing, our updated travel blog is here! So, what do you think? If you’ve been a reader of our blog, you’ll notice it looks a little different. If you’re new here – welcome to Postcard Jar. Why the change? Over the past few months, we noticed that some functions of our blog weren’t working quite right. Nothing major, but there was a hiccup every now and again. Our “theme” was old and couldn’t be updated anymore. We’d also compiled a growing list of things we couldn’t figure out how to do and we didn’t have a logo. But we do now! What do you think? Back in 2014 when we started this blog, we enlisted the help of a good friend who does web design to get us started. We did our best to update the posts and pages ourselves. We were amateurs, and we knew it. That was okay because blogging was simply a hobby we started as something to do between doctor appointments and surgeries when Ann had become ill and was unable to work. Over time however, our blog and interest in it have grown. In addition to traveling more places […]

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Ann’s visit with The Weary Teacher

Ann — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 16:39:11 +0000

A couple weeks ago, while helping our daughter, Meghan, get settled at her new place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I met another blogger who is just inspiring! Her name is Haley Curfman and she is a second grade teacher in Blackwell, Oklahoma. You might remember her (or at least her dress) from social media. I had come across a Facebook post several months ago about Haley wearing a white dress which she had allowed her students to decorate with drawings of things that make them happy. It was such a sweet idea and even though I’m not a teacher, I loved her creativity and wanted to learn more. Apparently, she had a few rules for her students when they colored her dress. #1 – They had to draw something that made them happy. #2 – They couldn’t cross anything out. #3 – They couldn’t cover up anyone else’s work. After seeing that adorable post, I checked out her blog, The Weary Teacher, and just loved the creative photos she had staged and posted like the ones below. Thanks in part to the prop gathering/placement and photography skills of her mom, The Weary Teacher has created some of the most hilarious scenes […]

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At least for us, blogging is more about relationships and not just the numbers

Ann — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 19:47:08 +0000

This week marks the fourth year of our travel blog, Postcard Jar, and we can’t thank you enough for following along on our journeys. Since we wrote that very first blog post from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, we’ve been collecting all kids of data and analytics to gauge the success of our blog. We’ve kept track of page views, Facebook followers, bounce rates, comments, shares, and retweets. But at the end of the day, we’ve come to realize that at least for us, the most important number of all is how many wonderful relationships we gained. When we look back over the past year, what makes us the happiest are the trips we took with family, the new and interesting people we’ve met along the way, the readers we’ve inspired to go places, and the incredible opportunities we’ve had to partner with businesses, community groups, and destinations. Instead of giving you a detailed summary of our year of blogging by the numbers, we thought we’d share a few of our favorite travel experiences and a some of the relationships that have impacted us the most. After Steve quit his job as middle school principal last summer, we took […]

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