I have always made an effort to send postcards to everyone in my family when I go on a trip, as well as one to myself. I keep the ones I send to me as a souvenir and then I also know if they should have arrived at the recipients yet. I had one grandparent that died recently that had always traveled a lot in her younger years that loved to receive them and then have a discussion about the trip next time I visited. It might be an hour or two out of each trip (I spend some time to write a meaningful note to each person) but well worth it.

Quite frequently when I go to visit them they still have the cards sitting out somewhere and it becomes a discussion point. I believe it shows a lot more attention when you've gone to the effort to select a card, find a stamp, write a note, and send it back to them.

I've even gotten stories about going through the process of sending a postcard -- in Argentina right after the currency crisis it took the main post office in Buenos Aires 15 minutes to figure out how much the stamps should be to send a card to the US because of the fluctuations in exchange rates. They gave me so many stamps it took up the whole upper right corner of the postcard to get all of them on there.