Hello! This week’s carte postale arrived in my mailbox yesterday (April 6, 2021). It’s a promotional postcard from TravelAlaska.com (if you live in the United States, maybe you got one, too?)
It’s the third sign in recent weeks that appears to be telling me: visit Alaska!
The first sign was a couple of weeks ago when I was flipping through channels and a program caught my attention. It was a documentary about the subsistence lifestyle of Native Alaskans living near Kotzebue.
Currently, I’m enjoying season 14 of the Food Network’s “The Great Food Truck Race,” which happens to be taking place in Alaska, where seven teams compete to see who can sell the most food. They do this against a natural backdrop of beautiful, snow capped mountains!
In addition to making their signature dishes, the teams complete challenges, like deep-sea fishing for giant salmon, panning for gold, and hunting for chaga mushrooms. (It’s down to two teams: Breakfast for Dinner and Tasty Balls. The champion will be named next week in Fairbanks and will win a cash prize.)
I’ve always wondered how certain destinations become THE top travel spot. A few years ago, it was all about Portugal. Then it seemed everyone was going to Iceland. Suddenly, Thailand was the place to be!
Is there someone in the travel industry who decides this stuff? If so, how do they choose? Do they spin the globe and point to a spot? Throw a dart on a world map?
Because if it were based on the number of visitors alone, then France would take the top spot every year. It’s the most visited country on the planet! According to the World Economic Forum, nearly 90 million people visited France in 2018. (I was one of them!)
But if we keep seeing Alaska on our screens and in our mailboxes, maybe we’ll be tempted to head to “The Last Frontier” when the pandemic is over and it’ll become a top travel spot!
Have you been to Alaska? What are your travel plans post-pandemic? Tell me in the comments below!
Over the years, I have accumulated hundreds of postcards from around the world, which I’ve either purchased from my local antique shops or received from thoughtful jet-setting family and friends who know I collect them. When I travel, I also like to send myself a carte postale just for fun!
I hope these postcards will make you want to revisit a favorite vacation spot or to embark on a journey to the destination of your dreams (when it’s safe to do so, of course!)
And if you’ve been to the destination featured, tell me about your experience there – I’d love to hear from you.
Until the next Wednesday Postcard, stay well!
Bonjour: A Francophile Blog 
Great that you were one of those nearly 90 million people who visited France in 2018. I was at least one of them, probably four, maybe five, depending on how they count. In 2018 I took four trips to Paris, and on the way to one of them I stopped off in Nancy for a couple days, to see David Hermann’s staging of Rossini’s opera “L’Italiana in Algeri”.
https://operasandcycling.com/crash-of-an-airbus-at-the-opera/
(But I’ve never been to Alaska, I must admit.)
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Yes, maybe they counted you up to five times! That’s great you got to go to France often in 2018! I got to visit the Airbus assembly plant in Toulouse, so I have an affinity for the airliner. While it’s kind of sad to see it as a “shipwreck” in the opera photos, I love how the Airbus gives Rossini’s opera a modern-day touch! Thanks for sharing your post!
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David Hermann is one of my all-time favorite stage directors. I have seen several of his opera productions in both Nancy and Frankfurt, and in 2017 he came as our featured guest to my German-language opera appreciation course Opern-Gespräche, where he spent the entire evening talking with us about his work and career.
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I visited Alaska way back in 2004 when I was a kid. Although I was very young and don’t remember the details, I recall enjoying the iceberg scenery and taking in the sights in various cities like Juneau, Skagway, Ketchikan, and Anchorage. Crazy to imagine that it’s part of the US, as it’s so different from the rest of the states…I really hope to travel internationally post-pandemic, ideally to venture out to Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam…), but I’d otherwise be happy just making it out of my state within the US! Thanks for sharing this week’s postcard, Darlene. 🙂
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Love your post-pandemic travel plans, Rebecca! Thanks for sharing! After being indoors for so long (not complaining, though), I feel like I need to relearn how to be outside. Like you, I’d also be happy just to venture out of state. Thanks to this postcard, Alaska is looking like a good place to start. I guess direct mail marketing still works! 😊
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