A Colorado woman’s passport application mistake provides a stark reminder of the importance of having the correct documents when you travel. According to 9News.com, when Lara Marxhausen went to apply for passports for herself and her family for an upcoming trip to Mexico, the post office clerk suggested she save money by getting a passport card instead.
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The Department of State opened an emergency passport office in Hot Springs, Arkansas. According to the press release, the new office is located in an existing passport printing facility. The passport factory has been open since 2007 and more than 30 million US passports have been produced there since that time. Because passports are printed on-site, the office is able to offer extremely fast passport processing, allowing applicants to receive their documents within 24 hours. To be eligible to apply…
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When you run out of pages in your passport, you have to get more pages added or you won't be allowed to travel. Usually, adding pages is no big deal-in fact, until just this summer, the government didn't even charge for it. However, tech entrepreneur Sanjeev Midha had a passport so large, he had to get an early US passport renewal instead. According to AOL.com, Midha's passport had enough pages that it could almost qualify as a small novel: a…
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When I was a kid, Halloween was more than just October 31st. It was a month-long celebration, and usually included a trip to a Haunted House and/or a local theme park in addition to trick-or-treating on Halloween itself. For the past 10 years, the Ocean Park theme park in Hong Kong has taken that experience and put it on steroids with its "Halloween Bash." (h/t In Transit) This year is their 10th anniversary celebration, and they're pulling out all the…
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For Dean Mancuso, an American traveling in Thailand, a lost passport was more than just a temporary inconvenience. It actually left him stranded in Thailand, begging from other Americans in order to support his Thai wife and his two daughters. How could this happen? Well, for some reason, after he lost his passport, Mancuso didn't go to the embassy to get a new one. Without any identification, it was impossible for him to go home, to get a job, or…
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For most Americans, one of the first steps in the process of submitting a passport application is to stand in front of a white background and have the photo clerk at the nearest drugstore take your picture. But that wasn't always the case. In fact, according to the Oxford University Press blog, passports did not have to include a photo of the bearer until 1914. Before that time, the Department of State relied on detailed written physical descriptions to ensure…
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In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, the following post is written mostly in Pirate. Arrr! September 19th be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, but just 'cause it's in the past, that doesn't mean that your buccaneering days are over 'til next year. Hoist yer sails and make your way down to the Cayman Islands, which come November 11th through the 21st will be filled with the dirtiest scalawags this side of Tortuga! In other words, it's…
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Rome might seem like an unlikely place to travel and celebrate Halloween. After all, what's scary about pasta, pizza, fine wine and gelato (except, perhaps, for the resulting effects on your waistline)? The Eternal City is beautiful and filled with life, but there's also a darker, haunting undertone to the city as well. And what better time to explore it than Halloween, traditionally the day when the spirits of the dead get to come back and mingle with the living?…
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It's hard to believe, but there was a time when you didn't have to fill out a passport application to travel internationally. In fact, passports weren't required for international travel until the first World War, though governments had been issuing passports or "documents of safe conduct" for centuries prior. After World War I, the League of Nations decided that passport requirements should be maintained for international travel in peacetime as well. Although today we think of passports as essential, when…