The Travel Chick

There was a time when all an American needed to travel to countries like Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean islands was a birth certificate. I grew up in Michigan, where crossing the Canadian border was undertaken as lightly as crossing into Ohio. Unfortunately, those days are gone. Today a passport is required when flying into the U.S. from those countries. While you can still enter by land or sea from Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean with just a driver’s license and birth certifcate, that loophole will be going away by Spring of 2009, after which you’ll need the passport.

This means you have to plan ahead, or just have the thing in hand. I have a friend who found an AWESOME travel deal to Jamaica just a couple of weeks before her kids’ Spring Break from elementary school. Unfortunately, the kids didn’t have passports, so she decided against buying the trip for fear that the kids’ passports wouldn’t arrive on time and they would not be able to go.

I prefer for everyone in my family to have a passport ready to go so we have the flexibility to take advantage of some of the incredible online travel deals I find, even if the departure date is only three days away. Passports are good for 10 years for adults, 5 for children, so we’ll have plenty of time to use them.

However, if you’re fairly sure you’re not going to be taking any spur of the moment trips abroad and don’t have any foreign travel plans, you could be reluctant to spend the cash for a passport you might never use.

Passport or no passport? Before making your decision, why don’t you head over to the U.S. Department of State’s website for more information? The site tells how long it’s taking to process passport applications (currently around four weeks, two for expedited applications), lists application fees and describes the different options, such as the new passport card.

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