Over the border and through Customs, to grandmother’s house we go! AND IT’S ABOUT BLOODY TIME!

This time it’s for reals folks!  You may recall, a while back I wrote about my misadventures in border crossings.  After multiple trips to-and-fro across the border, multiple detainments, and multitudinous visits to a host of government agency offices – but happily NO cavity searches – my prayers have been answered!  Sing hallelujah.

It’s been a *&^%$#@! nightmare.  And you might think that I’m lucky to live in the DC metro area.  If need be, I can just pop on in to Homeland Security, the State Department, the Passport Agency.  You’d think this would be lucky lucky me!  No.  It did me absolutely no good.  I visited them all.  I called every number that Border Agents gave me.  I shook every deadend telephone tree to it’s proverbial roots.  I pulled my hair out by the roots.  I threatened, plead, cajoled…all for naught. 

And FYI – it turns out that somone reported their passport stolen and the monkey hired to do the data entry miskeyed my passport number into the report.  So although not actually stolen, the government believed it so.

But then one day, I sniffed out a small passport office in downtown DC tasked with processing the paperwork on lost/stolen passports.  I scuttled through the building’s lobby with my 2 year old trying for all the world not to make eye contact with the security desk, all the while feeling like a criminal 007-type using a child as a decoy.  Once I infiltrated the proper floor, I located the suite housing my last great hope and badabing-badaboom, there I met Erma.  She photocopied my passport and 2 days later called me (she actually called me!) to report that *snap* just like that all was well again in my travelling world.

Ain’t that a kick in the head?  Half a year of sweating cavity searches at the borders, following the rules, banging my head against the walls of red tape…and one little guilty sneak into the right building fixed it all in just 48 hours.

Erma – I love you.  My unviolated cavities love you.  But most of all, my husband loves you.  Passport ineptitude was making him a raving lunatic.