My current passport expires in October of this year, so on Monday I sent a variety of supporting documents and my old passport off for renewal. Of course, this means an awesome deal to Iceland will now appear in two weeks and we won’t be able to go.

This passport still bears my maiden name and even though it was ‘amended’ on the back page, I have been subject to manual check-ins and some strange looks for the last 7 years. Not too surprisingly, many gate agents don’t know to check the back page for name changes. Not that I’ve ever been denied boarding, but it will be so nice to just hand everything over and have it match!

Of course, this name situation made filling out the renewal form a little tricky as I’m not exactly sure what the passport office considers my ‘name most recently listed on the passport’ to be. Is it the name the passport was originally issued in or the name it was changed to in 2002? I sat on hold for almost 30 minutes with the official passport office, so, in the end I just filled everything out the best I could and sent along a copy of my marriage license in case anyone wants to be lazy. (Of course, the email I sent was answered after I mailed everything off and it turns out I didn’t need to send in my marriage license after all and was typically overthinking the entire ordeal.)

Because I like all the stamps I received over the last several years, I scanned in the pages of my old one in case they don’t return it.

Eric seems to think that they won’t return it, but my first one (1994-1999) was returned with a double hole punch in the cover and a canceled stamp on the front page, so we’ll see.

Regardless, this passport book has taken me to South Africa (twice!), Mexico, England, Canada (twice!), Curaçao, Switzerland, France, Spain, Ireland, St Martin and Germany and I can’t wait to find out where the new one will take me over the next ten years!