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Good postcard ✨🙌🧚‍♀️

Love your postcard design! Mostly I just like that you created your own micro-country 🙂 I plan to send cards out for WPD, but I just purchased some world themed cards to send. Maybe next year I'll be ambitious enough to design a card.

Hi Smokey, excellent postcard, and it is so meaningful being integrated with Satchelland. Congratulations! 🙂 I would love to have one, but I am a bit out of circulation with my reciprocal mail. I hope the situation will improve within the next few months. 🙂

Please include me to receive one of your WPD postcards. I have one of mine with your name on it, too. :) Oh, and I designed my own, too.

Hi Smokie, Excellent cards you have designed! There will be a lot of happy people receiving them! Have a nice weekend, take care

I love the postcard and would be very happy to receive one, if you have enough to go round. It would go very well with my collection of Satchelland stamp(s).

I haven't a postcard or stamp from Satchelland yet, but would love to have one :)

Smokey, I asked Rob for the October stamp to stamp to use the TARDIS and going through history ,every stamp has to be an event in history or a disaster...i think you can go as far back as possible and pick up a stamp that shows the event or personality...etc. Great to know that Autumn is on its way and that this summer has been absolute murder with the continuous heatwave.They say that 2024 summer has been the hottest ever...I'd like one of those cards for 1/10/20024..I think that you have kept my address too.

Hi Smokie, great challenge again, lots of interesting stamps, love birds on stamps, congrats on reaching 22 years of marriage, mine has just surpassed 40! Take care

Great and fun video, I enjoyed a lot. Great to see some South American presence specially with a remarkable woman. Congratulations on your Anniversary! One day before my birthday, I will not forget it :D

Such a fabulous video. Great story. Happy Anniversary and Love how my random questions fell in your video

Hi Smokey! Even I was a bit out of breath at the end of your world tour. 🙂I also hold my breath to see where you will land next. All in all quite an adventurous episode. I enjoyed it very much as usual with you and Rob's Stamp vs Stamp. I liked the stamps very much. Especially the USA bird stamps were beautiful. I enjoyed it that you landed twice in South Africa and it was interesting to see what stamps you chose. Table Mountain is a nice excursion. Congratulations with you and your wife's 22 year wedding anniversary!!! May many more blissful years be ahead. Now I am off to Rob's part of the collaboration. 🌏🛫

Roberts video was good.

Always interesting to see how you two interpret the same concept! In this case, when landing on the US, how Rob narrowed down to the specific state/town, versus how you kept it broad to the entire country when you landed there!

The USA bird stamp is a thing of beauty

Another great Stamp vs Stamp video. It's interesting that Rob tended to choose slightly older stamps while you chose slightly newer ones. Loved the connection between them and congratulations on 22 years of marriage. When you're with the right person, it's easy and I bet it doesn't feel anything like 22 years.

Hi Smokey , glad to see my envelope made it to you. Great selection of cards you received from around the globe. All the best Mont.

Hello Smokey! Thanks for the great video and for sharing all the nice postcards, mail and stamps! I really liked the frog postcard from Belarus, the cute slug 😂, and the Dungeons and Dragons postcard and stamp from Jilly. It is indeed difficult to fit in various stamps on a standard size postcard and find space to write and decorate, so if someone doesn't mention that they collect stamps, these days I only use one stamp with the international rate, but if the person likes stamps, I try to fit in a few different stamps to make up the rate. Oh, you MUST make a dedicated decision to visit the UK and tour the country!!!! Doesn't your church possibly have an exchange possibility with a church in the UK, and you can go there for a period to preach at that church and that church's minister comes to preach at your church? Just wondering. That would be a wonderful experience!

a long but enjoyable episode .... been a while :) I personally enjoy a variety of stamps on my cards received, but if it is coming from an unknown person it is always better to know what the person has to say , about their life and what is on the postcard.

Hi Smokey! Great video, I hope you can visit Great Britain some day!

In answer to your question about stamps, I buy both. If the profile says they love stamps, then I add a bunch of smaller denomination stamps. But if they don't make a preference then I will add the international stamp.

Hey Smokie, great video, another great batch of postcards & stamps, the UK has a lot of interesting places, Chester & Merseyside have some great tours & attractions! Hope you get to visit someday! Have a great weekend

So many great places to visit here in the UK. I can recommend Whitby, the home of Dracula, which also has some great Fish & Chips restaurants 😋.

I hope one day you will come to the UK London is a must York is beautiful Durham and Newcastle too Ringtons Tea is amazing 🤩 Cream tea in Cornwall and St Micheal’s Mount is beautiful 😊

Great video Smokey! I'm excited when I see notification of your new releases. If you want the traditional British tea experience, you should definitely check out Betty's in York.

I like putting a range of stamps on when I able to on my postcard same time I use the prepaid / maxi cards

This was truly interesting to me..I was surprised that it was..thanks for digging into its history.😊

WOW ! A lot of sharing life episodes..... and no beers involved ! Very interesting show ! Thank you Gentlemen !

Pabay stamps were issued as a local post by Clive Feigenbaum - he was a very colourful character... worth looking him up!! Colnect says the Isle of Pabay was one of the only Scottish Islands that was genuinely granted permission for a local post, and is one of the few islands that Feigenbaum legitimately produced stamps for. They are classed as cinderellas. :)

This is a clear local post. Scott list some of these, but apparently not for this island. Same with rattlesnake island

Fascinating. Thanks for all your research

Thanks for the video check out the stamps and history of Lundy Island, similar in many ways and interesting!

Hi Smokie, interesting video, I have a couple of these stamps I'm my collection along with other islands around Britain, all in a separate album as I also have coins & banknotes too from another island! I would class them as Cinderella's, Have a great weekend, take care

Well Pabay is a new place to me 🙂 I would say that first 2/6 stamp is a Cinderella. You can really get into these island issues, especially from those around Britain. I have a good number of stamps from Herm Island, Lundy, and Bernera Island. None of them are listed in Scott's. I think some sprang up as a fringe item for tourists (the "currency" on Lundy stamps is the Puffin, which I find cute and cool 🙂). Keep up the excellent work, my friend! 👍

Seems to me these Isle of Pabay stamps are private carrier labels that pay for partial journey. While I don't think they should be considered Cinderella, they aren't UPU recognized either. In my view, these stamps should be considered along with other private mail services that issue stamps as proof of payment. In the end, its up to the individual collector to decide his/her preferences and objectives. Interesting video as always. Thanks Smokey!

Just as a PS: You recently did a video on the Satchelland cinderella you produced. Read my other comments and then consider this: Since you (or perhaps Mrs Smokey) is the minister in charge of the ministry of postage, if you decide that one of your cinderellas needs to be applied to all mail to cover the cost of a fee to transport that mail from Satchelland to the nearest USPS post office, then perhaps your cinderella would evolve from being a cinderella to being a local stamp. (Not sure what view the USPS would take on that, though it would probably be negative.) Just a thought

Hello Smokey, What an interesting question this raises. I tend to agree with you for the most part concerning whether the stamps of Pabay are stamps or cinderellas. As you say, a cinderella has no postal validity, and these stamps clearly do. To me, the stamps are what I would consider to be LOCAL STAMPS, that is stamps that are valid for postage within a limited area. There are a number of places around the world that fall into this category. Some in the UK are Lundy (an island of the southwest tip of England), Staffa (also in Scotland) and several others. These are mostly islands and the stamps pay for transport of mail to the mainland where normal postage needs to be applied for onward mail delivery. As such, they are (in my opinion) stamps, however, being local stamps they are not listed in most catalogues. (There may be specialised catalogues that list them, but I don't know of any, but I'm sure there must be a focus group somewhere that at least produces a stamp list of issues.) So, if we agree that these are real stamps because they could fulfil some postal function, even if only locally, that sort of sounds easy, but actually it just gets more complicated from there. Look at the following examples: 1. In 2000 Australia introduced a goods and services tax (GST, basically the same as VAT or Value Added Tax in the UK). While GST should be added to the cost of goods and services within Australia, goods or services provided to overseas clients are GST exempt. To show this, Australia Post started issuing two types of stamps - those intended for domestic use and those intended for mail overseas. The latter all have a blue tag with 'International Post in white. Technically (at least in my opinion), this should mean that any Australian stamps without the International Post tag should be considered local stamps as they are only supposed to be used in a local area. Admittedly that's a pretty big area, but it is still limited. Despite this, the world's major catalogues continue to list both Australia's domestic and international stamps. (As far as I know, the only other country that has gone down the path of producing domestic and International stamps is Vanuatu.) 2. Charnie has mentioned recognition by / membership of the UPU as a criterion for identifying whether a stamp should be classified as a stamp and listed in a catalogue. While this is perhaps a good starting place, it also breaks down a bit. Take for example the stamps of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus or the now defunct South African homelands (Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei and Venda) and perhaps even such places as Biafra, Katanga and South Kasai. While being nominally independent, their independence is/was not widely recognised nor were they members of the UPU and yet mail bearing their stamps was accepted and the stamps can be found listed in most major catalogues. The region of Iraqi Kurdistan also issues its own stamps, separate from Iraqi stamps. I have used these stamps on international mail from the Kurdistan region and the mail has been delivered to its recipients overseas, yet these stamps are not listed in catalogues. I'm not sure whether the stamps of the Republic of Artsakh (formerly known as Nagorno Karabakh) are listed in catalogues, but I have received mail from there. The situation with Transnistria is possibly similar. 3. Stamperija is a company which I think is situated in Lithuania and produces many, many stamps for countries such as Central African Republic, Chad, Djibouti, Solomon Islands, Burundi, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Togo, Niger and the list goes on. These stamps are a little dubious as many catalogues will state that they are recognised by the various postal authorities (whatever that means) but are not available at post offices in the respective countries. How accurate this is, I don't know. I do know that the stamps produced for Burundi are largely made available and are used for postal purposes. They are listed in Scott, Michel, Yvert and Tellier, and on Colnect and Stampworld, but they are not listed in Stanley Gibbons. So, how many catalogues have to list a stamp for it to be a stamp? The fact that SG doesn't fully list stamps from many places since they were 'issued in excess of postal requirements', does not necessarily disqualify them from being considered to be stamps. By that definition, most modern stamps are issued in excess of postal requirements. Since few people write letters, the few that are posted only really need those nasty postal labels and postal requirements are met without any stamps at all. 4. When the Soviet Union was breaking up in the early 1990s, many stamps were produced for various member countries, and also various regions of the former Soviet Union such at Batumi, Tuva, Komi, Tatarstan and many, many more. At the time it was unclear whether these were valid for postage or not, though it now seems to be most unlikely that they ever were and these issues are regarded as illegal issues. Interestingly, the government of Tuva (an area of Russia near Mongolia) did authorise a number issues until the central Russian government banned their use and listed these also as illegal issues with the UPU. Since then, illegal issues that purport to have been issued by many countries (though primarily smaller countries that are less inclined to spend most if not more than their GDP fighting the producers of such material in courts around the world in a game of legal Waka mole) have been released. Again some of the smaller African countries (among others) come to mind. As these are not valid for postage anywhere (perhaps with the exception of the locally authorised Tuvan stamps), we can agree that these are all cinderllas. 5. Lastly there are at least 2 places in Australia that have unilaterally seceded from the country. The two that come to mind are the Province of Bumbunga (in South Australia - see the Wikipedia entry) and the Hutt River Province/Principality (in Western Australia - also see the Wikipedia page), both of which were basically farms whose owners fell out with the Australian government and declared sovereignty. Both issued stamps and in the case of Hutt River, coins and banknotes, not to mention passports were also produced. While I know very little about the stamps of Bumbunga, I did once have a cover from Hutt bearing a Hutt River Province stamp. This was affixed to the back of the envelope while normal Australian stamps were affixed to the front. The use of the Hutt stamp ensured that the envelope would be transported to the nearest post office where it entered the normal mail system. In this case, though basically a novelty, it could be argued that the stamps of Hutt River performed the same function as the stamps of Pabay and should perhaps be regarded as local stamps, though they are usually classed as cinderellas (perhaps incorrectly in my opinion). I could probably come up with a lot more to discuss here, but I have probably waffled on for far too long. At the end of the day, whether we regard such material as stamps, local stamps, cinderellas, labels or something else is to some extent subjective and whatever stance we take, we should be prepared to justify our position as you have done with your Pabay stamp. However, we must also recognise that not everyone may be convinced by our arguments and perhaps we must accept that in the end we may have to agree to disagree with some people.

NIce video Smokey. However, I can't consider the Isle Of Pabay item you have an actual postage stamp. To me, an item is considered a postage stamp if they're recognized by a foreign country for cancellation purposes which doesn't seem to apply to I of P. I would use as an example, the Sovereign Military Order or Malta (SMOM). While their stamps aren't listed by Scott or Gibbons, they are listed in many of the European catalogs like Sassone and they do have over 50 bilateral postal agreements with foreign governments. That's my two cents on the subject.

Interesting discussion. Thanks!

Hi Smokey! This was a very interesting video, thank you! First of all I didn't have any knowledge about the tiny Isle of Pabay, or that there are actually stamps with its name on them. I don't know what the "official" rules are for a stamp to be an acknowledged "official" postage stamp and whether it involves the UPU. I have to agree with you, however, if a stamp is a stamp bought to pay for the service of postage, it is "more" than a cinderella and can be called a "postage stamp". I found it interesting that one of the first stamps you bought was metallic and shiny and not a "normal" paper stamp, and that it was from a tiny island, in a way forecasting that you are eventually going to collect stamps from micro countries. 🙂

Hi Smokey I'm from South Africa. As a very keen stamp-collecter I enjoy your videos a lot. thanks for all the great info you're giving to us.

Hi Smokey I hope you don’t mind but I going to send you a postcard from Australia . I also a postcrosser as well

Very enjoyable collaboration:) I was rifling through images of stamps in my head for each letter, trying to guess what you would pick. I got the zip code one right when watching the other video...but that was it. "Unique" made me think of the only stamp I've purchased which is too recent for my collection , but I had to have it. It's an Icelandic stamp made from wool to look like an Icelandic sweater. That where I was born...plus it's fuzzy:) I look forward to your next videos. Thanks for the smiles:)

I'm catching up with all your videos, but I didn't want to miss comment on this one and say what and incredible experience you have! I was so glad hearing all about it. And super happy that @stephenogier7499 got the stamps!

Very nice video. Thank you for sharing your purchases. I have been a Liechtenstein collector for many years. I have pretty much all of them except for the high priced items. Thanks again.

The floral stamps are beautiful - so delicate. Thanks for showing the new USA stamps, Smokey.

dealers are selling large Minkus page lots of stamps since they went out of business. I did hear that Amos advantage has new pages for some of the Minkus albums.

It is very exciting to look for certain specific stamps to buy and to find them for sale. Thank you for showing us your purchases, Smokey. Very nice stamps at good prices.

Loved the Monaco stamps !!! That Manila folder with the Monaco stamps looks like a great pick up !! Well done !! Nice that your wife was there looking out for deals as well!!

Hello Smokey! It is a great and generous gift from Vera. I like the postcards as well as the stamps. The machins look absolutely beautiful in the transparent stock page. It is the best I have seen to showcase the colours. Lovely! I think my favourite colours are the blues and purples and greens, but all the colours are beautiful. Thanks for showing us Vera's gift.