Even Better than a new camera!!!!! My new passport has been sent out for delivery to....ME.

 "You don't miss your water till your well runs dry..."  - William Bell, 1961, Stax Records. 

1978. Three months backpacking through Southern Europe.

I never thought I'd miss a piece of I.D. as much as I have missed having my valid passport. We renew every ten years and in the past it was a fairly quick turnaround process. When I last renewed my passport in 2013 I used an expediting service which turned around the document, from application to passport in my hands, in about ten days. 

I was shocked when I went to renew it this year and the State Dept. website showed a message which  stated that expedited passports would take seven to nine weeks to turn around. And that was predicated on shipping your application to them via Express Mail, and having all your ducks in a careful row...

Armed with this bad news I was unhappily settling in to "worst case scenario" mode -- wherein I presumed we would bump right up on the nine weeks and then I'd be notified of some sort of glitch which might require me to re-submit and head to the back of the line again. I am nothing if not an ardent believer that everything related to my life will, at one point or another, fall into the worst case ordeal imaginable. But oddly, it almost never happens. In fact, maybe only once out of every thousand times. Or less. The odds have become background noise and yet I still steadfastly imagine, at every important step in life, that the roof will collapse, I will be arrested, hacked or delayed and I will lose my boarding pass somewhere between the food court in the airport and my departure gate. So I am constantly vigilant. Or as my favorite swimmer/psychiatrist friend couches my condition: "Hyper-vigilant." But with a massive balancing dose of optimism and sense of entitlement. (Not sure he meant "entitlement" as a compliment...in fact, I'm kind of certain.). 

All of this to say that while I thought I'd be trapped here all Summer I won't be. To my relief, joy, happiness, etc. I find that my passport zoomed through the process in just a day or two over one month's time. I conjecture that having been through background checks by the Secret Service on four different occasions, connected with photographing U.S. presidents, helped with whatever vetting process/background checks the State Dept. uses. And I'm sure it didn't hurt the processing schedule that my Global Entry/Trusted Traveler credentials are up to date. Still, I'm thrilled that the folks who do the work under-promised and over-delivered. 

But, in keeping with my posture of gloomy hypervigilance I'll maintain a worst case scenario right up until the minute I pull the passport out of the mail and hold it in my hands. 

Looking back over time, which is a bizarre and disquieting exercise, I find that I've held valid passports all the way back to 1963. I was seven and a half years old when I got my first one. I needed it when my family moved to Turkey for two years. And using Turkey as a home base we traveled extensively in the middle east...many stamps on that old book.

One sad note about passports in the current age is that we no longer get stamps on the pages in most countries. Everyone is going to electronic verification and even last year when I was in Vancouver and I asked for a stamp at Canadian border services I was told...."We don't have stamps anymore. Sorry." (But being Canadian they were so very nice about it). I'm glad now that I have kept all my old passports because with their inky, blurry stamps they are like a truncated travel log reminding me of trips with family, trips with a college girl friend, a honeymoon and many subsequent trips abroad with B. They are also like a journal of jobs from those travel focused years with a roster of corporate clients. Weird business travel everywhere. From St. Petersburg, Russia to the Dominican Republic and dozens and dozens of destinations in between. 

Now, without the stamps, I'll actually have to become one of those guys with the little, black Moleskine notebooks and a dubiously/messy and unreliable fountain pen,  sitting at a sidewalk table at a coffee shop busily recording each step of progress on a trip. Wiping the leaky ink, inadvertently, on my pants leg.

After getting my tracking number from the State Dept. website I rushed into the house to tell B. about the anticipated arrival of my coveted travel doc. She suggested I get busy planning a shooting trip to.....anywhere. Now. She's not traveling this Summer. Taking care of her mom in San Antonio and splitting her time between there and here. But she was adamant about me getting out the door and taking some of that photographic gear that seems to be stacking up with me. Being the optimistic pessimist I am I'll start looking immediately but I won't book anything until I have the document in my hands. Then? All bets are off. 

I really enjoyed my time in Vancouver recently and think that might be a fun break from the heat. Unless they too are forecast to reprise their own previous Summer heat wave. There is an Air Canada flight that's direct from Austin three or four days a week. Four and a half hours in the air. That sounds almost luxurious. 

But we may just roll the dice and see what comes up. 

The only hesitation I have is the labor intensive task of picking the right camera and lenses to take with. Now that's a real dilemma. But I have some ideas there too. 

Just thought I would share today's happy news. 

Makes the heat that much more bearable.