Passport Renewal
My passport would have expired in January, so I needed to renew it since we’re planning on being out of the country for more than a year. I was 16 when I got my passport (it was for a school trip to France, which kicked ass! Jess was there, we had a ridiculous amount of fun), and it was less than 15 years ago when I got it, so I could just renew mine. Shaun had gotten his passport when he was younger than 16 so he had to get an entirely new one.
For my passport, I picked up a renewal form at the post office and filled it out (piece of cake). Since the boutique I work for has an in-house photography studio, we decided to use that after hours to take passport photos for both me and Shaun. We set up the lights so that our faces were evenly lit with no sharp shadows and used a boring off white background. We followed these guidelines: the travel.state.gov guide for professional photographers. Luckily we both have experience with photography equipment, so it was fairly easy to set up and crop down in Photoshop to the correct size and specifications.
This is how they turned out:
(the colors are a little wonky here because I took a picture of the pictures with a camera in lieu of scanning them on here)
So, after I got my two passport photos and filled out my form, I took them plus my old passport to Senator Richard Burr’s office. One of the secretaries put all the stuff together for me plus a letter from Senator Burr and shipped it off Fed-Ex to where ever. It was $135 total for a new passport (and expedited processing) plus however much for Fed-Ex second day shipping both ways.
Shaun had to get an entirely new passport, so his was a little more expensive, plus he had to add the extra step of waiting in the passport line at the post office.
Next up: we’re getting our visas through some third party visa-getting service (hopefully we won’t get ripped off), then it’s plane tix and a storage shed on my parent’s property, then all we have to do is wait until early September!