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From an okay guy, advice on traveling

By JAN GLIDEWELL
Published October 11, 2007

Excuse me if I bounce around a little here, but I always have had the attention span of a gnat on crack, and age hasn't made it any better.

I want to talk, for a moment, about passports, to keep what almost happened to me from happening to one of you.

You may think the date of expiration on your passport means it is good until that date, but what nobody had ever bothered to tell me was that different countries require your passport to be valid for different periods (usually three to six months) past the stated expiration date.

In two years of planning a trip to Europe that we finally really did get to go on, I frequently checked the expiration dates on both my and my wife's passports. I can be a little obsessive about things like that - if there is such a thing as being a little obsessive - but they both expired well after the end of our proposed trip, so I found other things to obsess about.

There are a lot of choices in that area when you travel: luggage tags, travel-size toiletries, carry-on bag sizes (mine never looks as if it will fit into those measuring things next to the boarding gates). You have to think about traveling dates. Acquaintances of mine once discovered on arrival that their travel agent had booked them in a day early for their hotel, which had canceled their reservation when they didn't show up. It was their honeymoon. They have a new travel agent now.

I used a travel agent (a good one) for this trip because it required coordinating rail, air, automobile and boat travel and hotel stays in four different countries using two different currencies, and it's pretty much all I can do to manage an overnight stay at a bed-and-breakfast that I have been going to for years.

Documents for trips like this usually don't arrive until shortly before the trip, probably because it's assumed that people like me will lose them, and because those assumptions, in my case, would be right.

I was shocked to see a paragraph on one of the information sheets that said my passport had to be good for six months past my return date. I discovered that (like you always discover things like bad news from the IRS or your insurance company) on a Friday evening when there was nobody to call.

My own research turned up a story about a man and his daughter who were denied boarding a flight to Israel because his passport expired five days before that country's six-month limit, but, as I learned from a State Department site, different countries have different restrictive periods, and you have to check the embassy site from each country in order to find out what it is.

Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands, all on our itinerary, had three-month limits. France, which we were visiting for one day on a cruise up the Rhine River, had a four-month limit, which I squeaked under by a mere five days.

My travel agent called me as soon as she got my message and informed me that the tour companies just put down that six-month figure as a guideline. I thought (but didn't voice) some unkind thoughts about companies that charge me thousands of dollars so they can scare the heck out of me.

Anyway, the trip was great, nobody denied me admittance anywhere, except at one women's room where I learned that cutesy gender terms (like "gulls" and "buoys" in an American seafood joint) only serve to further confuse non-German-speaking tourists who, admittedly, were already confused when they got up that morning.

So, lesson learned, trip over, and I applied for and received a new passport in less than two weeks, despite horror stories I had been hearing to the contrary.

All stepdads not bad

On another subject entirely, I heard two profiler types on CNN, in reference to that awful story about the young girl who was kidnapped and raped while her attacker videotaped the incident, refer to the "stepdaddy syndrome," in which male sexual predators seek out women with young children to gain access.

I don't doubt that sometimes happens, but as a stepchild myself, and as a man who has been stepparent to six children between the ages of 2 and 27, I would remind young mothers who might be spooked by that syndrome not to jump to scary conclusions. Be cautious, but not insane about it.

Some of us seek to become stepparents because we love the mothers of the children we stepparent, and because we don't think they deserve a raw deal because of the death, divorce or desertion of a prior spouse or partner.

We also usually, or frequently, wind up picking up the tab for absentee dads who don't chip in. If you have doubts, contact a therapist or agency knowledgeable about child development and family relations, and pay attention to what you hear. And communicate regularly and frankly with your spouse.

Most of us are okay guys.

[Last modified October 10, 2007, 21:08:15]