HUG Cards

WHEREVER we may be, 

it is our family and friends 

who make our world.

When we retired and started traveling in 1997, we kept in touch with friends and family with stories that we would send by that new form of delivery: e-mail. In those first years, we had an ordinary film camera, and Judee's hobby was to send handmade printed cards using her photos. 

During the summer of 2005, however, Judee found herself without paper or printer while cruising to Europe, so she invented our first digital postcards. Using Keynotes on the Mac, she created one slide (not a whole slideshow!), then saved the one slide as an image. Voila! The HUGcard was born. Why did she call them HUGcards?  Because all the cards were meant for, and sent to, our grandchildren.  Each one was signed “Hugs, from Mimi and Grandpa.”  

Because her first postcards from Europe were a such a success, she continued to send "digital" travel postcards, not only to our grandkids, but to the many honorary grandchildren we adopted along the way.  

Often Judee's HUGcards were simply attachments to longer letters and stories.  She claims to be a writer first, a photographer second.  Alas, her stories aren’t on this website.  Judee admits she probably should have started with a blog! Nevertheless, we think the postcards speak for themselves and think of them as our pictorial “travel log.”

Her HUGcards (over a thousand!) can be found in the two archived blogs attached to this blog:  Ratherby's Archive (2005 - 2014)  and the Cheshire Cat's Archive (2006 - 2008) Enjoy!