Wednesday, May 25, 2016

check your passport!

OMG! My tenant and friend Carol, who lives on my top floor part of the year, makes her permanent home in Banos, Ecuador. Her mother, aged 103, is in a nursing home here and Carol and her sister, who lives in Toronto, share caregiving duties. Now Carol's sister is back from travels, so Carol left this morning to go home to Ecuador - a very long journey, many hours of travel including a long stopover in Miami before flying on to Quito, with three heavy suitcases which have required days of preparation to pack, as she brings back gifts of shoes and clothing from Doubletake for the families of friends there.

She left early this morning after many goodbyes, and a few hours later, she was back. It turned out that her passport will expire in five months. She was going to get it renewed in Ecuador, where there's no lineup, but apparently, she is not allowed into the United States, even for a stopover, with a passport that will expire in less than six months.

Poor Carol! She'll expedite matters and try to be off again within a few days. But in the meantime, I rushed upstairs to look at my passport. It expires in November. I fly to NYC in July. The same thing would have happened to me - I would have arrived at the airport ready for my trip and been sent home.

Be warned, my friends. I am printing the renewal forms as we speak.

2 comments:

  1. Not only that, you need a biometric passport! This happened to me just before my trip to NYC early April. I discovered, mere days before leaving, that my Canadian passport was not biometric. Thank gawd I also have a British passport which is.
    Juliet

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  2. I don't even know what biometric means! Will Google immediately.

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