Have passport, will travel

Nearly $500 and a week later, I have my new passport and what a lovely piece of work it is. No question but that the all-new US passport is a product of the Tea Party Design Center. The visa pages depict scenes from murals you might see in a 1920's Midwestern public library. Purple mountain majesty, the fruited plains, home home on the range, riverboat steamships, sailing vessels, Mt Rushmore. Yep, it's all there. The USA without all that messy urbanity, you know, the one with all those Jews, Muslims, and 'colored people'. Oddly, and to my point, even the Statue of Liberty is depicted in the center of a harbor with no cityscape (or NJ) surrounding it.

This is the America that They want to take back. Let 'em have it, I say. Where seldom is heard a discouragung word.

When you stupidly mutilate your passport as I did in my basement laundry machine, they don't return your old passport with the newly issued one. So, I lose the opportunity to reminisce a bit through old visa stamps from the period 2006 to the present, a time when Jase and I first began traveling together and spent many many days in fun and exotic places around the world. Well, Jason, we'll always have Paris.....

So I am a newly minted international traveler, just like 40 years ago, my first passport and my first trip to England and France with a school group. Dr. Seuss was right--Oh, the places I have gone. And so many more to come. Lucky lucky lucky me.

Next stop, Dubai UAE. Time to get the newspaper launched next Tuesday.