We have made a VERY EXPENSIVE mistake.
Life was simple 15 years ago.
All the children were on our passports.
Easy! and cheap too!
Now the government in all their wisdom have realised they can milk us even more by imposing the regulation that each child needs a passport, every five years. This, I feel is utterly ridiculous, considering we have often taken new born babies abroad who bear no resemblance to the child facing passport control 4 years later!
As we have a very large family, the children's passports all expire at different times.
a few years ago we were nearly caught out, when in June Bella was laughing over the tea table about how she hated her passport photo taken when she was five. No, we said you must have been 7....and so the argument when on , until we found the passports and checked. She was right, and four of the children's had expired. We had to pay for the check and send service but the cost difference was not too much.
This year has been a disaster!
Last summer we knew that Mair and Jono's passports needed to be renewed and I put a reminder on my phone for Easter. This came and went with wedding preparations and we completely forgot, until Luke needed his passport to order a new pin number. Only then, too our utter horror we saw that their passports had expired in the beginning of July.
Jono was on school camp for the week, so we could do nothing. We booked photos as soon as he came back and filled in forms and then discovered due to passport office cuts and summer backlogs that the only way we could get these in time was to travel to Liverpool (our nearest office) and do the one day turnaround at a fairly exorbitant cost.
It gets worse.
The ONLY passport office in THE ENTIRE UK that had a vacancy before the second week in August (two weeks into our holiday) was BELFAST.Yes, that's Belfast in Ireland!!!!!
So, on Friday, instead of final packing and cleaning, Simon flies to Ireland.Up at 4am, Airport at 6am, flight at 7 am, land by 8.30 am, bus into belfast to Passport office by 9.30am. Hand in all information, and have four hours site seeing then collect passports and fly back home!
We have well and truly learnt our lesson.
All expiry dates are now in a file on my phone and on a list in our house and on my Filofax!
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