Little Whale Cay, Destination Number Zero

Photo by thomashawk, Flickr.

The Passport To Everywhere challenge was born, naturally, on a plane. Joe was flipping through my passport and speculated that I'd need to add more pages soon. I have issues with our country's passport agencies -- my name is misspelled on the front page of my passport, even after I sent it back to have it corrected -- so I wanted to know exactly how long I'll be able to put off dealing with them again. So I counted my remaining empty spots for stamps, assuming four per page: 39. And I'll renew my passport in 2014.

"The way you travel?" Joe said. "That could actually happen." Sounds like a challenge to me.

Our plane was headed to Nassau in The Bahamas, and I was so excited to knock one stamp off the list immediately. Joe and I waited in line at immigration, and I probably handed my passport to the agent with a big, goofy smile on my face. He flipped through the pages, past the original pages, and arrived at the front page of the added pages I had to get a couple years back.

Now, let me explain to you about added passport pages. The front page is a sort of title page, stamped with an explanation that these are government-approved added pages and not just some DIY effort for which I'm sure you could be arrested or detained or whatever. It's not a page for stamps. It might actually say "not for stamps" on the page. No credible immigrations officer would ever stamp this page.

And yet, there is now a Bahamas immigration stamp on that page in my passport. Progress denied.

So 39 is still the working number, but I guess we should consider it more of an estimate. (Grr.)

Posted in: PassportToEverywhere