Setting Little Booklets Free

In Breaking Away, the charming little movie about bicycling and broken dreams, there’s a scene where Barbara Barrie talks with her son about her passport. She’ll never really use it, she says, but she carries her passport all the time so she can present it proudly if ever asked. With newfound hindsight, I should’ve held onto my wife’s passport as tightly as Barbara Barrie held on to hers.

If you have a passport, you know the drill.  Every ten years you have to renew the little book.  The process is cumbersome, even online, because the authorities ask for almost as much information as they did the first time around.  Everything goes into the (re)application except a copy of your birth certificate.  Three pages of personal information later, you print, date, and sign, attach an unflattering black-and-white selfie (no smiling!) and mail it in together with your expiring passport.

So far so good with the hindsight.  But as soon as I went to the post office last October I made a big boo-boo; the so-called fatal error.  The desk clerk convinced me to send the application through regular mail.  “Save your pennies”, I remember him saying. “After all, you’re sending through one government entity to another government entity.  What could possibly go wrong?”  So I saved my pennies… and that’s the last I ever saw of my wife’s passport.

Did this machine eat my wife’s passport?

Okay, maybe not ever.  Perhaps the little booklet eventually finds its way home after completing whatever misguided tour it’s been taking.  Or maybe, as our travel agent was quick to suggest, it was mangled and shredded by the sorting machine of an automated postal facility.  Or maybe #3 – the one that has me staring at the ceiling into the wee hours of the night – it’s the latest identity of the head of an international drug cartel.

Laugh or feign horror at my expense, but you can’t blame me for wandering to the worst case scenario these days.  The outside of the mailing envelope said “National Passport Processing Center” while the inside contained what obviously feels like a passport.  Easy pickings, especially for an enterprising minimum-wage postal worker.  My recurring thought: why didn’t I fork over the fifteen bucks for a secure, insured, overnight envelope?  Because I’m cheap, that’s why.  Ah hindsight, thee be a cruel character.

Where o’ where did you go, little book?

Not that you’ll ever need it (because you’re learning from me) but there’s an easy process to report a “lost or stolen” passport.  You provide as much information as you can and if you’re lucky the authorities identify and “decommission” the missing booklet, reducing it to mere paper and plastic in the hands of another.  But that still left my wife with no passport, which meant filing a new (not “re”) application.  Dig out the birth certificate, take another photo, make an in-person appointment with the local post office, and pay another application fee.  Mercifully, I watched that application get sealed into one of those secure/insured mailers before disappearing down the conveyor belt.

My first inkling of identity theft hit when our credit card company informed us of a $500 charge from a merchant in Germany, a company I didn’t recognize (and couldn’t begin to pronounce).  My second inkling hit when our travel agent tried to make charges for the trip we needed the passports for, and our other credit card was rejected.  One inkling makes you pause, but two inklings?  That pushes the big ol’ panic button.  But the god of credit cards must’ve been looking down on me favorably because the first charge was cancelled while the second charge was only denied because our travel agent had an old card on file.  In other words – to my knowledge – we’re talking random events instead of identity theft.

There’s a happy ending to this story. (Actually, it’s more like an intermission since the authorities sent me a letter saying my wife’s passport is still lost or stolen until it’s not.)  We have new passports now, which means no renewal process for another ten years.  Our compromised credit card was cancelled and replaced.  And we froze our credit in case a “new wife” out there tries to open accounts.  I’m not convinced that’ll ever happen but I’m breathing easier as the months pass by.  And rest assured, I’m keeping our little booklets secure so nobody can, you know, “break away” with them.

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Author: Dave

Five hundred posts would suggest I have something to say… This blog was born from a desire to elevate the English language, highlighting eloquent words from days gone by. The stories I share are snippets of life itself, and each comes with a bonus: a dusted-off word I hope you’ll go on to use more often. Read “Deutschland-ish Improvements” to learn about my backyard European wish list. Try “Slush Fun” for the throwback years of the 7-Eleven convenience store. Or drink in "Iced Coffee" to discover the plight of the rural French cafe. On the lighter side, read "Late Night Racquet Sports" for my adventures with our latest moth invasion. As Walt Whitman said, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Here then, my verse. Welcome to Life In A Word.

29 thoughts on “Setting Little Booklets Free”

  1. That’s just a lot of work. Last January I had to renew my passport, but I went the expensive, “Pay for everything” route only to find there was a major snow storm on the east coast that froze my passport at a USPS office for about a week. My wife is currently saying that she’ll just stop traveling when her passport expires next.

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    1. We paid the expedite fee and I was surprised how quickly they turned them around. But everything you have to go through beforehand justifies your wife’s stance.

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  3. Oh dang. Thanks for the forewarning about this. Some day we’ll renew our passports. I’ll keep in mind not to use regular mail. At least, I hope I will. That’s frustrating and frightening. Glad for your happy ending! And, you going somewhere cool??

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      2. I will take your recommendations, Betsy! The itinerary is fairly set (Danube River cruise) but we get free time on several of the excursions we have booked.

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      3. Where I stayed, a tiny little town called Gaming nestled in the foothills, is so far off the beaten path, I doubt you’d be able to get there and back in time. Mostly, my friends and I traveled as far and as wide through Europe as we could on our three-day weekends. They only had classes M-Th precisely so students could do this. We went everywhere. The cruise sounds awesome!

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      4. As the crow flies, the Danube is only a thirty-minute drive to the north of Gaming but we’ll only be stopping in the bigger cities. I’ll have to give a nod to the south as we float on by!

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  4. Wow – what a set of circumstances Dave! I let my passport lapse back in the late 80s – I should have just renewed it as I can’t even cross the border to Canada now without a valid passport since the Patriot Act after 9/11. Because renewing my green card in 2015 was such a hassle, partly because I have no fingerprints (years of typing and accordion playing), it was suggested to me that by not having a passport I am deemed to the Immigration and Naturalization Services as “a person without a country.” So I intended to get a Canadian passport, a few years ago, then it was the pandemic. I finally looked into the paperwork and since I am “starting from scratch” I have to have three guarantors to verify I am an upstanding citizen and they have had to have known me for ten years and they can be a banker, lawyer, or a doctor/dentist. I am gobsmacked (I also like that word) that I have to do that – I feel uncomfortable asking someone to vouch for me. I’ll ask my boss (lawyer) for starters. I’m tempted to just forget the hassle. I did have a few bucket item trips I wanted to take when retired, but I can forego them I suppose. I have to renew my green card for 2025, so I have some leeway if I choose to get the passport first.

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    1. Persist, Linda! The handful of times we’ve traveled outside U.S. borders have exceeded our expectations. So many beautiful, safe places in the world. At least we’re past the delays tied to the early years of COVID. It was only recently I read how passport processing is “back to normal”, which I can attest to after we finally got those applications submitted. Only took a few weeks to get the new booklets.

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      1. I have to start the process in earnest Dave if I am to get it done before I start applying to renew my green card. I looked in comments to see if you said where you were going. Austria is very beautiful. I was there with my parents in 1979 and with my father alone in 1969. He was German and it was his first trip back to German and we did some sightseeing there and Austria.

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  5. Thanks for the tip on passports. I had just been looking at mine recently. It expires in 2025. I don’t look forward to all the paperwork. I had heard that most of it is done online now. Glad you caught the charges on your credit card!

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    1. Interesting how some travel (ex. Viking Cruises) requires the passport to be valid six months after the trip itself. I guess that makes sense, in the event you get stuck in another country (COVID!)

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  6. Passport renewal is a pain. I remember in December 2019 frantically trying to get another for our anticipated honeymoon. I got it back in a week thinking wow! In reality I forgot to sign the application, silly me! Take two was successful, but then I changed my last name and had to get another new one. Better safe than sorry, but that application fee is a bit hefty. I saw from a comment you’re going to Austria, such a beautiful country! How exciting! If you are in Salzburg I have a gelato spot to recommend.

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    1. We were frantic as well, since the better excursions associated with our Danube river cruise could not be booked without current passports (and excursions sell out quickly). We were lucky to be able to book almost everything we wanted, including a daylong tour of Salzburg. We will have free time during that excursion so I’d love the gelato rec – thanks!

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      1. That is stressful! Glad you got it worked out. The gelato place is called ALPZ Gelato & Cafe and it wins worldwide rewards. I think they have huge sundaes too but we stuck with the basic cones and they were incredible!

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  7. Oh gosh, I hope all the major drama and little inconveniences are well under control and that your trip is smooth sailing (pun intended) from here on. The Danube was one of our favorites! Our passports are still valid for several more years, but we will heed your advice and assume the expensive option is the only way to go!

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  8. Oh my–NOT a pretty set of circumstances! So glad you came through the experience relatively unscathed, Dave. From what I’ve heard from Viking travelers, your trip will be worth the passport-hassle!

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  9. I remember that movie, haven’t thought of it in years. We had to get our passports renewed in the summer of 2020 as the pandemic was ramping up. We felt like just removing our masks to get our photos taken at FedEx was risking our lives. I’m sorry you went through what you did, but am pleased that you’ve gotten that chore out of the way for another 10 years. Your trip sounds delightful.

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    1. “Breaking Away” will always be a favorite, especially since I went to college close to Bloomington in the 1980s. So may great scenes and messages in that film.

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    1. I think I’ll always be frugal, regardless of my circumstances. Just can’t help wanting to get the best value for the least expense. We’re headed to Austria in June, down the Danube River starting in Hungary and ending in Germany. Twelve days or so and the itinerary looks amazing.

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  11. I will confess that I have never gotten a passport. Marianne had one years ago, but it lapsed. We have come close to applying 2 or 3 times (even got pictures taken once) but each time we got busy with something and it went on the back burner. That is a problem with living so far from a border.

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