Ship Post Office

Was on my daughters ship recently. The aircraft carrier John C. Stennis. The ship is huge. Like a floating city. She took me to their Post Office.

Interesting.

Not too long ago, I watched a documentary on the construction of this ship. I guess you could say that the word 'huge' is an understatement for its' size <G>.

It is no wonder they are often referred to as 'floating cities'.

Chimo

Bujutsu

What a great opportunity to see our military in their environment! Did you send yourself some envelopes? Have your daughter send some to you, especially on unique days such as on "11/12/13" this November.

Cities is right. In the 6 days spent on the ship my daughter got to take my son and I around and show us a bunch of stuff both military and non. They had a barber shop a couple of convenience stores. Weird seeing stuff in English and Arabic. Did not see a movie theater though because the crew has access to lots of video entertainment in their crew areas. There was halfway decent library area a jail. They said they wouldn't keep my son. A laundry area loaded with washers and dryers. Their was about 1100 family aboard to welcome them home plus crew for a total I'm guessing of around 5000. Still no matter what we did there was a quite a line sometimes starting on one deck and ending on another.

Did not get to send me anything from their mail station but I have gotten a lot of postcards and such from my daughter with nothing but the ships cancel and no stamps necessary.

The post office on my ship was about half the size of that barred window on the right, and didn't have a writing shelf.

Cheers, Robert

Sounds like you had a good time checking out the ship! I hate waiting in lines too. Thanks for showing the post office on that ship!

Also, I always wondered how the got mail on and off those ships? Helicopters or what?


vacuume man

Mail buoys.

Mail on an aircraft carrier probably comes on board from a bunch of different aircraft but the mail workhorse is the C2A Greyhound. They had a few of these on board. Its basically a large turboprop. Got this picture off of the web of some mail being unloaded on a carrier.
The guys on the deck (sometimes called skittles) have differing jobs depending on color. But everyone pitches in for mail

Here is a scan of the postmark from the ship. I don't know if all the ships have a different postmarks or if it conforms to a standard but something about it looks a little different.

Here's a link to a catalog page of all of the various postmarks used by the USS John C. Stennis:

http://www.navalcovermuseum.org/res..._CVN_74.html

Thanks wt1! I did not know that the web site existed.