Did you hear about the christmas card that was delivered -- 93 years late?
A christmas card that was mailed on 23 December 1914 in Alma, Nebraska, was just delivered to its destination in Oberlin, Kansas. It was mailed by cousins to Ethel Martin. However, the intended recipient had already died, so the card was given to Bernice Martin, Ethel's sister-in-law. Bernice Martin was impressed with the pristine condition of the card, despite its age and mystery.
"We don't know much about it," she said. "But wherever they kept it, it was in perfect shape."
The postcard features a colored drawing of Santa Claus and a young girl.
But where has this card been all these years? The card had apparently been found somewhere in Illinois.
"That's all we know," she said. "But it is kind of curious. We'd like to know how it got down there."
Martin would like to know the card finally made it to Oberlin. It had been placed into another envelope and given a current stamp to complete its journey, because its original one-cent stamp from 1914 was insufficient postage.
Source
Pantagraph.com (quotes).
Wikipedia tells me Helix lucorum moves at an average speed of 1 mm/s, and according to Google Maps, the distance from Alma to Oberlin is about 104 km, so a snail would take 1205 days, or about 3.3 years, of continuous travel to cross that distance.
This bit of trivia brought to you by quite a lot of free time on my hands.
wow, so even snails are faster than the USPS, too! thank you!