Weddingbee Blog

It is now officially our one year wedding anniversary. We were supposed to be on a plane headed towards the Bahamas today to celebrate a wonderful first year. Sadly, we have canceled our trip.

I’ve been planning this trip for weeks and even took Thursday and Friday off to run last minute errands in preparation for our vacation. This morning I made a tediously detailed checklist and happily checked each item off as we packed our suitcases. Mr. Spider joked that I should take pictures of my checklist and our perfectly packed suitcases so I could blog about how insane I am. As we were going over the last few items, he opened my passport to laugh at my picture and then turned to me and said “uh oh.” Uh oh. Turns out my passport expired three months ago.

We hit the internet and started calling our airline in desperate hope that there was a grace period or any leniency or exceptions. It didn’t take long for us to find out that effective, October 1, 2007, any travel outside of the U.S. requires a valid passport and that the allowance of a U.S. birth certificate was no longer accepted. You cannot imagine how upset I became. Mr. Spider called our travel agent and had her activate the insurance we bought. The funny thing is, we almost never buy travel insurance but our travel agent convinced us, calling it our “broken nail” policy (if you break a nail and want to cancel the trip, you can at any time).

Mr. Spider was very nice about the whole thing and started unpacking his bags almost immediately while I sat and cried for an hour. Then I also went and unpacked my suitcase. Sigh. I don’t even know if I should go to work on Monday. We might try to plan another trip after I renew my passport so I need to save the vacation days.

You can’t even imagine how I feel right now. We keep our passports in a drawer and never look at them. The last time I used my passport was on our honeymoon and I didn’t even notice then that it was due to expire this year. I feel like I ruined everything and we will always remember how I colossally effed up our first anniversary.

The morale of this sad tale: if you plan on traveling outside of the US any time soon, please check your passport’s expiration date. I wish I would have taken just a second to check mine.