My current Canadian passport expires in 2013, as Canada only offers five year passports. As it happens, I was a trip or two from it being full anyway, so that wasn’t too big a deal to have to replace it so soon.
My British passport was issued in 1993; I’ve had the forms to renew it printed out for about a year now, I just never get around to it.
The amusing thing about having only a valid Canadian passport is that when I travel to the UK, I get a stamp that avers:
My current passport is 1 year old. It needs changing, as it is in my maiden name. However I’m not prepared to pay full price for another passport just because of that. I first visited another country at 6 weeks old, so I’ve had a passport my whole life.
I got my first passport at age 10. I’ve never been without one since, always renewing as needed. So I am never without a valid passport. Along with my personal international travels, my job occasionally sends me to Europe with only a`week or two notice.
I must have been about 15 - prior to that I travelled on my mother’s passport. I’ve lapsed a few years on one nationality and nearly got refused entry to the UK on the other one - it’s all ratty and the cover’s coming off. So really I’ve got no valid travel document right now which is NOT GOOD.
I’m hoping this post will make me pull myself together…
About eighteen months. We had to get new passports to travel to Italy. It was hell. The passport office was backed up completely. I called senators and congressmen and begged to no avail. Mine came in the mail but my husband’s was very late. He literally had to go to a passport office in Philadelphia about a hundred miles from our house just to beg them to finally process it. He finally received it less than forty-eight hours before our flight.
I had my first passports issued when I was four weeks old - my mom and dad took me to the States to show me off to their parents (which was a good thing, as one of my grandfathers died suddenly a couple of months later). I carried those passports, baby pictures and all, until I was 10.
I’ve renewed them constantly ever since. The last time I needed to renew my U.S. passport was this July, so I could fly to my grandmother’s funeral: it had expired a couple of weeks earlier, but I know a guy at the embassy and he had a temporary passport issued for me on the spot.
