My God, is it something about Passports that makes this things happen?! I’m getting paranoid. When I go home today, I’m going to check just to make sure my Passport is still in my “Important Documents” envelope.
Murphy in action. A passport or a will are probably the only 2 documents that could lose you tens of thousands of dollars, so of course they get lost!
It has a bunch of properties that put in in the sweet spot for loss:
- You don’t use it very often, so if it’s not where it should be you don’t notice right away.
- When you do pull it out, you’re doing things you don’t normally do, like scanning documents and going through airports, so there is no “routine” to keep you on track.
- When you’re carrying it on your person a lot, it’s because you are traveling, which provides lots of opportunity to misplace it.
- When it’s time to put it away, it’s usually because you are coming back from traveling, and there is a lot of stuff to put away.
Since we’re sharing passport emergency stories, here’s mine.
My wife is Canadian and has family/friends in Windsor, CA. A couple of years ago we went to Ann Arbor to visit friends before crossing the border to Windsor, where we visited family and finally arriving, quite late to another friend’s house to stay the night. Because of where the friend lived we have to park on the street overnight, and we normally never leave anything in the car. However, THIS time, we got sucked into conversation/hanging out, (we hadn’t been able to see them in person since before COVID), and although I made a mental note to go out to the car to bring in our passports, gifts, etc., I promptly forgot to do it before falling asleep.
As you can probably guess at this point, our car was stolen overnight, with all of our passports (mine, wife, and son) in it! Windsor police were very responsive and helpful, but they did not locate the car (they eventually did, months later). We had two problems. Not only were we in Canada with no passports, we had a vacation to Mexico planned for Christmas break, less than 4 weeks away. We spent the rest of that Saturday driving around Windsor hoping to spot our car, researching the procedures for emergency passport replacement online, and on the phone with both US and Canadian passport agencies trying to get an emergency appointment.
Fortunately for my wife, there happened to be a Passport Canada office in downtown Windsor, and she was able to get an appointment first thing Monday morning. Unfortunately for me and my son, although there is a passport center across the river in Detroit, they could not squeeze us in on Monday and the earliest appointment we were able to get was Wednesday in Buffalo… We were also given instructions on what to do at the border when we crossed without our passports. Sunday we could do nothing but hang out, fill and print out forms, and have some passport photos taken at the local Shoppers Drug Mart.
First thing Monday Morning, we were in line at the Canada Passport office. Submitted the forms, paid a bunch of money, and she had her brand new passport the same day by 4pm. Now we could cross back into the US! This we did by taking the Windsor - Detroit tunnel bus. Declared our passport stolen with the Customs and Border Patrol officers, handed in printed copies of our passports (which I thankfully had scanned and in google drive with a bunch of other important docs) and the Windsor Police report, answered a bunch of questions to their satisfaction, and were duly admitted into the US, where we took an Uber to the nearest car rental agency and rented a car for the drive back home to Cleveland. That Wednesday we drove to Buffalo to submit the forms and do the interview for emergency passport replacement for my son and I, and paid a bunch more money, but was otherwise a smooth and straightforward process. We didn’t get our new passports the same day like my wife did, but they arrived in the mail within a week, and we were able to go on our Mexican Christmas Vacation with no problems. All in all, a very interesting experience that I hope to never repeat!
My son lost his passport or so he claims. He has known that he needs a new one for the last 3 - 4 months to travel with us to Rome (Italy not New York) and a cruise through the Western Mediterranean.
He reported it lost so he wouldn’t have to hunt through this dozen or so boxes in storage to see if it is there. So even if it gets found tomorrow it is no help
He has not applied for new one yet with all of his procrastination and excuses. Money for the application is not a reason. He could have the money easily if he actually prioritized his spending.
If his application is not submitted within the next 2 weeks, he will lose his spot on the the cruise.
He has been told repeatedly that this is not a house rule. It is a government, cruise line and airline rule and is not negotiable.
He is 23, so age is not the issue. Feel free to pit his (lack of) decision-making here.
It’s bad enough when this happens when you’re sitting safely in your home. I can’t imagine being stripped of everything when in a different country.
It was quite stressful, but if you have to go through the “passports stolen while abroad” experience, fortunately we were in the best possible place for that to happen!
Does this mean that his ticket is available? Did I mention how much I like you?
What’s my favorite bourbon and we can negotiate.
And he still has two week to go over to the next town and submit his application at the post office and have them take his pictures.
Let me know about the brand of bourbon and I’ll get a stash for you! I also speaka da Italian (well, I do actually, a litte) so I’d be quite useful on the trip. And I have a valid passport and I know exactly where it is (I looked yesterday, LOL).
And you know that if he fucks this up, he’ll blame everyone but himself and be a misery to be around :(. I’m guessing he is not paying for his share of the cruise, so hey, it’s not HIS money he’s wasting!
By the way, age may well be the issue. Dweezil’s escapades were at age 22, and your son is 23. I’m not sure at what age boys become sentient beings, but I’m convinced it’s older than that! (also, Dweezil is on the autistic spectrum, which doesn’t help).
Boy howdy, ain’t that the truth!
As I said upthread, it’s also useful to have copies of your birth certificate and your Social Security card. Neither of those is terribly expensive to replace, nor are they needed all that often, but when you DO need them, sometimes you need them in a hurry. When I was doing phone support for a state unemployment program during COVID, lack of these was a huge delaying factor in many, many claims (and replacements were typically very slow to come by, especially then).
The hard deadline is when we need to the deposit. We’re not going to pay the deposit and lose money when he Fs this up so no action on the passport by then we are letting the cruise expire.
Back in 1960 or so, well before we met, my wife had her purse stolen the day before she was supposed to go to Moscow with a bunch of people who had trained for a year at Indiana U. to become Russian teachers (this was a reaction to sputnik). She was able to get a replacement passport in a day, but lacked the visa for the USSR. She was booked on a trip to DC to get a visa from the Soviet consulate, but then got a call from the police who found the purse in a trash can (minus the money of course) and flew one day after her group but managed to connect with them. Had a great time.
You store it in a condom? 
That would be a shock for the inspector with the rubber stamp - gnarly! 
new meaning to, “Safe travels”!
My nephews played a passport routine on me this weekend. The youngest asked the eldest for a passport and said 'This isn’t you! It’s Maurice Chevalier." The eldest is a trained singer and had watched The Marx Bros sing You Bring a New Kind of Love To Me from ‘Monkey Business.’ I laughed harder than anyone could picture it.
We missed our yearly visit to St Martin the year COVID shut the island down. The following year we went, but the country had some restrictions and required we purchase specific insurance to cover us.
The day before returning home we had to go to a medical center to get a Covid test, required by the airline. I was nervous. If we tested positive we could not fly until testing negative. We’d be stuck in paradise, right? Wrong. There was a specific hotel for people testing positive. Meals were brought to you, you couldn’t leave, not even to walk on the beach. We both tested negative and remained negative until just recently (likely exposed during our flight home this year).
Birds in a gilded cage? 
Some delays work out great. Mrs. Martian and I were in Hong Kong on vacation when Superstorm Sandy hit the Northeast. Our flight back to Newark was cancelled. It was cancelled far enough ahead of time that the airline contacted us with our new flight (three days later than the original) before we had even packed for the return trip. We were staying with my sister (who was living in HK on an expat assignment), so no problem with extending living arrangements. We were able to do a lot of the “too bad you have to leave so soon” stuff.
Back to passports. When we returned from Spain last fall immigration had facial recognition for Global Entry running. As soon as we got close enough to the kiosks I noticed our faces on the kiosk monitor with those facial recognition squares around them. The system sent us through immediately. We were still pulling out our passports when an attendant told us that we were approved and to move on (the system must have been new because they had to tell everyone to keep moving). I don’t think they even glanced at our passports and we certainly didn’t scan them - it was literally seconds between when we entered the Global Entry area and when we were through. I wonder if they would have even noticed (or cared) if we didn’t actually have our passports with us.
Unless it’s way different at airports than at cruise ports, they wouldn’t even have noticed. They are automating so much that on my flight last month out of JFK, I didn’t even have to show my boarding pass and ID to TSA - my passport and boarding pass were linked to my frequent flyer account so everything came up when my face was recognized. You still need to bring the passport for other reasons (not every entry has the facial recognition, you’ll need it outside of the US and of course, malfunctions are possible)