I just saw that my trusty passport was expiring soon, and decided that since I wasn’t doing any immediate travel, to renew it now.\u00a0 It was my first passport and had a bunch of stamps from my travels to Europe, New Zealand and so forth.\u00a0 But time marches on so I dropped my new photo, the old passport and the form into the mail.\u00a0 A few things:<\/p>\n
1. The website seem to direct you towards getting a cheaper “passport card” that looks like a drivers license.\u00a0 It’s faster to get and cheaper, but if you read the fine print you find it is ONLY good for traveling in\/out of the country by land<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 It won’t work for any air travel.\u00a0 My guess is that’s because there are lots of commuters between Canada\/Mexico and US.\u00a0 But the not-good-for-flights restriction isn’t immediately clear – so beware and dig around for the normal renewal.<\/p>\n 2. It only took about 2-3 weeks to get my passport with the regular mail-in service (not expedited) – much faster than I anticipated.\u00a0 They mailed my new passport (which has new RFID embedded in it and a much nicer\/glossier\/protected photo page).\u00a0 A day later, I got a brown, unmarked envelope with my old passport in it.\u00a0 They’d punched a hole in my photo page to void it – but I had all my old stamps.\u00a0 Cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just saw that my trusty passport was expiring soon, and decided that since I wasn’t doing any immediate travel, to renew it now.\u00a0 It was my first passport and had a bunch of stamps from my travels to Europe, New Zealand and so forth.\u00a0 But time marches on so I dropped my new photo, the old passport and the form into the mail.\u00a0 A few things: 1. The website seem to direct you towards getting a cheaper “passport card”…<\/p>\n