Passports, Visas, Insurance & Other Things that Go Bump in the Night...

"Oh, the horrible importance of unimportant things!" 

~No doubt said by someone who's terribly clever, but whose name escapes me completely at the moment

Into each life--and each adventure--some administrivia must fall. When one travels, this "busy work" comes in the form of forms. Mostly. We must have our paperwork ducks in a row, starting with our...

Passports! It's not enough that they are valid when we embark the QM2 on July 28th and will still be good when we return on August 18th. We learned this vital fact by accident. When we lived in Boston, we indulged in a few week long cruises to Bermuda. One time, the agent at the pier looked at our papers and said, "Oh, my! You barely have a week left on your passport." 

"No, no," I quickly assured him  "The documents won't expire for some months yet."

"But you don't understand," he said. "Your passport must be good for at least SIX MONTHS after the date you are scheduled to return." 

Yikes! If we'd been trying to make that trip a week or two later, we'd have been denied boarding! Fortunately, our passports are valid until the summer of 2020 so we'll be fine for our Norway trip, but we'll need to start the renewal process as soon as we get home.

Visas. Not necessary for this trip, thank very much. (If you've read my post about the back flips we had to perform to get an Indian visa for our world cruise, you understand my semi-euphoria!) Since the US, the UK, & Norway are all part of the Schengen Agreement, we may enter each other's countries for business or pleasure and stay as long as 90 days without a visa. 

It's good to have friends in the world.

Insurance. Along with taxes, this has to be most people's least favorite topic. It's one of those things that everyone must have but no one really likes unless they have to use it. I've always sort of thought of trip insurance as betting against myself. 

We never used to get it, but back then our travel was more spontaneous, less expensive, and we ourselves much healthier. Now I consider trip insurance a necessary evil. 

Since I have a chronic lung disease that means I travel with supplemental O2, we want a "pre-existing conditions waiver" on our policy. To qualify for that, our insurance must be purchased within 21 days of our initial booking. 

Done & done.

All in all, I'd rather be poring over which excursion to book than deal with these issues, but, like laundry and other unavoidable tasks, they must be dealt with. And if I 'm honest, I'm relieved now that I know we've got them covered. This way, none of the horrible things that can happen without them will be the monster under my bed keeping me up at night.

~~~~~

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