Before You Go: Passports and Visas
Lost Passports
Make photocopies of your passports, including the page with your photo on it. Take a set of copies with you (I hang on to my wife’s copy and she holds mine, a nice bonding thing to do and good advice based on the premise that if I lose my stuff it will be good for her to have the copy). Leave a set of passport copies at home with someone you trust and who won’t mind you ringing up at 2 am their time so you can ask them to FAX the copies to Papua New Guinea.
If you lose your passport abroad, you will have to get it replaced at an American Embassy or Consulate in the host country. The photocopies will help but may not be all you need. If you lose your passports, as soon as possible, call the American Embassy and find out what you’ll need to get a replacement. If you have three days left in Belgium and decide to see a few sites, it will be useful to know the Embassy will need two days to replace the passport before you drop in on the way to the airport thinking of using a drive through window (they actually don’t have drive through windows, that was a bad joke).
Embassies are generally open “business hours” which means you will not get a replacement passport absent a real life or death emergency after hours. If you are replacing a child’s lost passport, ask when you call the Embassy if the child must appear in person or if one parent can do the paperwork. You might be able to draw straws with your spouse and have only one of you miss the Paris Sewers tour while the other and the kids go forth underground.
The Paris sewer tour is excellent, allowing you to wander around under Paris’ most famous addresses. Extra fun for Phantom of the Opera or Ed Norton fans. It does not stink down there like poop either. Think wet sweater smell.
Most Embassies and Consulates do not have photo booths where you can get the pictures needed to replace your lost passport. The best idea is to get a few extra photos made when you take the pictures for your first passport back at home and carry them along. If all else fails, you can always spend more vacation time abroad enjoying the company of a photo developer in Rome.
While we are on the subject, the Department of State has a lot of information that will help you with your trip. One thing I’d recommend is their booklet A Safe Trip Abroad. You should be able to get it on-line, at some larger passport agencies or if all else fails, from the trusty Government Printing Office. Write to them at Government Printing Office, Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop SSOP, Washington, DC, 20402-9328. The ISBN Number for this booklet is 0-16-048791-9.
You can also get info sheets and pamphlets by mail by writing to Overseas Citizens Services, Department of State, Room 4811, Washington DC, 20520-4818.
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Great article! I wish I had read it BEFORE I went with my daughter on a 26-day EF school group tour of Europe….
The Paris officials did let me in the country we we arrived on the train the next morning, but when the group was walking to the Louvre that afternoon, I suggested to the teacher leader that we should go to the US Enbassy which I saw was located right nearby to get my passport replaced. He told me that since we were only in Paris on Saturday and Sunday (we were leaving for St. Malo in Northern France on Monday), the US Consolate office would not be open; therefore I would have to wait to get my emergency passport at the US Embassy when our EF group got to London on Wednesday (which would then be six days after it was stolen in Rome). We spent the next two days touring Mont St. Michel, St. Malo, and the Normandy beaches, ending up in Caen.Unfortunately, it was ME who was careless and had my passport wallet (with passport, driver’s license, credit cards, and insurance cards) stolen out of my shoulder bag in Rome on a Friday afternoon in June, somewhere between the Colleseum and Trevi Fountain, and just hours before our group was to board a night train to Paris. (By the way, if you’ve never taken an Italian overnight train with a group of 30, don’t even consider it!)
The teacher leader of our group had copies of all of our passports (and I had two extra color copies in my luggage). After talking to the EF Tour guide, he told me it was impossible to get an emergency passport in Rome since we had to leave later that day, so he said I was to get on the train to Paris with the rest of the group and my passport would be taken care of when we got to London later the following week.
When our group prepared to leave France via ferry from Caen, however, the EF tour leader and the teacher leader found I WOULD NOT BE PERMITTED TO GET ON THE FERRY TO LONDON WITH THE REST OF OUR EF GROUP. Needless to say, I was really very upset. Long story short? THE EF tour guide never even spoke to me. The teacher leader decided that he and I would take a cab from the ferry dock to the Caen train station, take a train back to Paris, take the Metro to a downtown Paris hotel where we paid 107 Euros per person for single rooms that night (even though they also offered smaller rooms for 75 Euros per person), got up the next day and took the Metro to the US Consolate office, waited 3 hours and paid 97 Euros for an emergency passport, took the Metro back to the hotel, picked up our stored luggage, took the Metro to the Paris train station, bought EUROSTAR tickets to London, and then took the Metro to our London hotel to catch up with the rest of our EF tour group the following evening. When the rest of the EF group was preparing to leave London to fly home two days later, the teacher leader and his wife, who were leavning us to fly to Spain to stay in Europe another week, left a note in my DAUGHTER’S hotel mailbox, telling her that I owed them over $1,200: the total cost for the cab, train, Metro, hotel rooms, emergency passport, and Eurostar tickets for BOTH the teacher leader and me.
From the time I discovered my passport stolen in Rome, however, he had never discussed with me me what my options were: when I could get my passport replaced, whether I wanted him to go with me to get a replacement, whether I was willing to pay for all of his costs to travel back to Paris once he was told that authorities in London would not let me in the country if I took the ferry from France, or whether I wanted to return to Paris to get the passport with my daughter instead (who was also a legal adult at age 18) .
When I returned home, I looked up the cost of staying in Paris and getting my passport on Monday morning after the rest of the group left via our tour bus for St. Malo. I found I could have paid to take the Metro from the hotel where we stayed in Paris to the Embassy, and then could have taken a train from Paris to St. Malo via Rennes, all for less than 70 Euros per person! Even adding in the cost of the emergeny passport, I would have had to pay so much less! In addition to the wrath I received from my husband over the extra costs for this trip which he felt my daughter and I should not have taken to begin with, the passport experience ruined the entire trip for me, and the unprofessional lack of communication from her teacher really upset my daughter, who had previously thought of him so highly. It has been a nightmare all around!