A Passport to…

Another task on my “to do” list before my trip to Scandinavia at the end of the summer has been checked off the list. I didn’t have to work yesterday, so I decided to take advantage of the available time and finally got around to taking care of my US Passport renewal. Though my existing passport will still be valid during the month I plan to travel this year, I have read that the countries I’ll be traveling through require your passport to be valid for 90 days after your intended travel dates. Since my current passport will expire at the beginning of December this year, I decided to play it safe and go ahead with the renewal process. I’ve been needing to go get some passport photos taken before I could do that, so I did it on my way home from work the evening before. After doing a little bit of research, I found that Costco provided the least expensive option for having passport photos taken. The US Post Office charges $15 for passport photos, Walgreens charges $10.99 for two photos, and I was able to get 4 passport photos for $4.99 at Costco (though I don’t know what I’m going to do with the extras).

With the requisite 2″x2″ photos in hand yesterday, I sat down and started filling out the DS-82 form that I had picked up previously at a local Post Office. After I had completed the document I took it, along with my current passport and a check for $110 (the fee seems a bit steep to me, but what can I do?), to the nearest Post Office to be mailed. I’ve had some stuff lost by the US Postal Service in the not-so-distant past, so I was a little leery of putting such an important document as a US Passport in the mail… but it is my only option. I can only hope that the delivery “signature required” service that I paid extra for does its job in speeding the mail on its way to the proper destination in Philadelphia.

I got my first US Passport back in February of 1989. My then fiancée and I had plans to travel to Germany for our honeymoon after we were married at the beginning of May, 1989. She had extended family in a few different cities in (then) West Germany that we planned to visit (and stay with), and an uncle living with his family in West Berlin. Since that was the first time I had traveled outside the country as a civilian (I didn’t need a passport when I was in the US Navy), I needed a US Passport to travel to a foreign country. We had to drive to San Francisco to apply for a US Passport for me, and to get an updated German passport for her (she was a green-card-carrying German citizen). As you can tell by my first passport photo, big glasses were still “in vogue” at the end of the 1980’s.

I don’t remember how much I had to pay for that first passport, but with the exception of my travel to Germany the rest of the time I owned the passport was wasted as far as international travel was concerned. I didn’t travel anywhere else outside the country before the passport expired 10 years later, in February of 1999. Oddly enough, there was no stamp in my passport for entering West Germany when I arrived, or for departing West Germany when I flew home to the United States near the end of May, 1989. However, as you can see from the stamp scanned and posted here, East Germany was well aware of my entry into and departure from their country. You see, to get to West Berlin from West Germany we had to drive through an East German border crossing and through a portion of East Germany before we would eventually arrive in West Berlin. This was back in the late 1980’s, before Mr. Gorbachev “tore down that wall.” I still remember that border crossing experience to this day. I remember hearing the border guard, in the military uniform of the East German police, asking us “Vaht iz your purpose in ze DDR?…” (East Germany was known as the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, a bit of an oxymoron since Democracy was the furthest thing from the reality that most East German citizens were living at the time). We were then warned to not stray from the main roadway as we made our way to Berlin. I could just picture East German police watching us from the woods with their AK-47s aimed and ready to fire.

It wasn’t until a few years after my first passport had expired that I again found the need for one. My wife (at the time) and I decided that we wanted to spend some vacation time at an all-inclusive resort in Jamaica. Since my previous passport had expired, I had to go through the entire process of registering for a new one again. Times had changed a bit since my previous one, and as you can see in the photo to your left the glasses got a little smaller and the haircut changed drastically (I had to tweak the scan in Photoshop a bit, to try and minimize the blue lines running across my face before posting it here). This passport was issued in December of 2003. Security restrictions were much tighter, and a lot less people were traveling for recreation by then, due to the relatively recent events of 9/11/2001 being still fresh in the collective consciousness of America.

This, my second and most recent passport, got at least a little bit more use before its expiration date. The first stamp is from the aforementioned trip to Jamaica, in January of 2004. We were living near Philadelphia at the time, so a trip to a tropical location mid-winter was a welcome diversion. On that particular trip we arrived at PHL wearing parkas because of the blowing snow outside, then changed into shorts and light fabric shirts, anticipating our arrival at Sangster International Airport, near Montego Bay, Jamaica. We took along an extra piece of luggage for the sole purpose of storing our parkas and winter clothing. The following year we decided to escape the winter cold again, and flew to another all-inclusive resort, this time in Cancún, Mexico. As I was paging through my passport looking for stamps to scan, I nearly missed the one from our trip to Cancún in 2005. Either the ink has faded over time, or the stamp was not very visible from the start. The image to the immediate right of this text is that stamp. Again, I had to do a little bit of manipulation to the resulting scan in Photoshop, to darken up the stamp a bit so that it could be seen. The Quintana Roo is visible, but I couldn’t make out a visible date anywhere. The following year we decided to spend a week at a timeshare located on the island of Kauai, so our passports weren’t needed for the trip. However, in January of 2007 we chose to fly back to Cancún again, so I received another stamp in my passport from Mexico. Though that was the last stamp I received, it would not be the last of my international travel and use of the passport. After my divorce, at the end of 2007, I moved back to the west coast… specifically, to the Seattle region. During the summer of 2009, I decided to plan a small vacation trip that involved driving up to and staying in British Columbia, Canada, for a few days. I took several photos while I was there, if you’re interested in seeing them. At the border crossing into Canada I was required to show my US Passport, but they did not stamp it. They just looked at it and asked me a couple of questions. The same happened a few days later when I returned back home to the United States. That was the last time I used my passport during international travel.

Enter the year 2013. With my interest in European history, I’ve had a yearning to experience more of the sights that Europe has to offer for several years now. I’m finally at a place in my life where I can afford to take the time, and spend a little on vacations. Besides, I’m almost 50 now… so if I don’t start traveling soon, I might run out of time to see all the places I would like to see. I have been promising my cousins in Norway for a few years that “one of these days” I would plan a trip to visit them and their families. Though there are other (less expensive to visit) places on my “to see” list as well, Scandinavia has always been at the top because of my family heritage. Because it is a bit of an undertaking (in both time and expense) to fly from the west coast of the United States to Europe, I decided to spend a few weeks in Scandinavia at one time, rather than planning a couple of different trips to see the different countries. That’s why I have packed Copenhagen Denmark, Stockholm Sweden, and several places in Norway into this one trip. When I return home near the end of September this year, I hope to have at least 3 stamps in my new passport book. However, I don’t want those to be the last stamps in the book before it expires in another 10 years. This time, I want to pack that little passport booklet as full of as many stamps as I can gather. I hope someday to see stamps in there from future trips to Amsterdam, Prague, possibly Russia and/or the Ukraine, and maybe Budapest and/or Barcelona. Iceland is another on my “to see” list, as well as the British Isles, and possibly Italy. Oh, the places I might see… with a valid US Passport.

[at the top of the paragraph, my new passport photo (or should I say “mug shot”?) that I sent in with my renewal application… it doesn’t look too different from the one I had 10 years ago, does it? 😉 ]