#15 – Get a passport.

I almost wrote this blog post a month ago when Dave and I first applied for and paid lots of money for expedited passports.  You know, because the hard work was done and all we had to do was wait for the passports to come in the mail.  Although, in retrospect, declaring it “done” might have only further jinxed a process that is clearly already cursed.

I’m pretty sure that a portal to some sort of administrative netherworld is positioned exactly between the City Clerk’s Office and the Federal Passport Office in downtown Chicago.

Short story.  We applied for passports.  They put all of the expedited passports and original documents from the day in a box.  They lost the box.

I won’t go into all the gory details, but I will thank God that we were able to produce new originals of birth certificates (thank you parents!) and whatnot and get passports in time for a little vacation.  Others were not so lucky.  Just from chatting with folks in line, I know of two canceled trips (one being a honeymoon!!!) and of people who lost all of their original naturalization papers.   Those puppies aren’t so easy to reproduce.

And all of this nonsense is so that we can cross the border on our upcoming trip to Niagara Falls.

Here’s hoping the view from Canada is significantly more amazing than the view from the US!