I travel a lot, mainly for work, and since a good portion of that travel is outside of the United States, I need a valid passport.

While US passports are good for ten years, a number of countries get upset if your passport expires within six months of entry. Since mine was coming up for renewal, I decided to use the break between jobs to get it done.

Renewing a passport is usually a pain. You have to get “official” passport photos, usually at the post office or at a drug store, fill out a form, mail it and payment to the State Department, wait, and if you are lucky your passport is returned in a month or two.

My friend Cynthia recently tried out the new online renewal process and said it was extremely easy. Since I didn’t have any travel planned that required a super-quick processing time, I decided to try it out.

The whole process took eight days from when I submitted the renewal until my new passport was in my hands. Crazy.

As a US citizen, I have become used to the government being somewhat non-functional. For example, I am working an issue with the IRS for my father where they send threatening letters saying he owes money along with other letters that say he has a credit (one that is much larger than the amount he owes). The solution, as stated in the letters, is to call, but no one answers and they say to just try again later. After several months of this we ended up sending a physical letter via the USPS in the hopes that it will get sorted out.

Finding a process that actually works, and one that greatly exceeded my expectations for turn around time, was welcome.

This doesn’t mean the process was painless.

You go to the website and enter in your current passport information. If you are lucky the system tells you that you can renew online. You upload a photo (I took a selfie against a white background) and if it accepted you pay the renewal fee and, bam, a week later you get your new passport.

I got all the way to the payment portion when I received this error.

Hrm. For $REASONS I use Safari as my main browser and since many websites are optimized for Chrome-based browsers you can hit issues, so I started again using Chrome when I got this message:

Seriously? All I did was attempt to renew one time and I got blocked.

I waited an hour and was still getting the message, so I said “screw it” and brought up a VPN to a site in Virginia. After that the process went smoothly, with a slight hiccup in that, this time, it didn’t quite like my photo and I had to tweak the size just a bit.

But outside of that it was much less involved than the old method, so kudos to the folks at the State Department who set this up. Do note that while you don’t have to mail in your old passport, there is a warning that once the process starts your old passport will cease to work, so don’t try this if you are pressed for time and want to keep using the old one.

While I was poking around through old passports I did want to post some cool visas I got back in the day.

One was for my trip to Syria:

and one from China the same year:

One of my passports in the past had to be sent back for more pages, but these days so much has been automated that I rarely get stamps anymore. I’m off to South America for the first time later in the year so perhaps I can get one there.