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Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
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Cuba Jurassic Park

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We are back from our Christmas trip to Cuba. A very unusual place for sure. Currently, there are no independent tourism visas issued by Cuba. We traveled on journalism Visas. So I am shamed into writing more as we get unpacked. Angie was questioned entering Cuba for at least 30 minutes. I had no questions asked of me. We don't know why. The people in Cuba were the most pleasant surprise. Extremely upbeat. I suspect you have heard outlandish theories of lizard people or Anunnaki or an otherwise different species of humans living among us. They are different, but look the same as everyday humans. In Cuba, it feels the locals think of the gringos as lizards. The lagartijas and the largatos, the special men and women intermingle among us, take pictures, drink alcohol and observe. They are indeed different. The clothes are different, the shoes are different. They walk a little different. It’s almost as if there is plastic bubble around them moving along with them, protecting them. ...
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Middle East 2022 trip

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We are back in Atlanta. We took our Thanksgiving holiday primarily in the Middle East. The country list was France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon. That made four new countries for us bringing our total to 85 Countries visited. We had 9 flight segments in 12 days and capped the trip off with marching in the Macy Day parade in NYC again this year. We are very strict on what we consider a country and we use the US State Department as the standard. We both lost (and gained zero) "countries" using this standard. Examples: Antarctica is not a country and isn't counted. Macau and Hong Kong were indepenpedent counties when visited, but now don't exist and aren't counted. There are a number of unexpected occurances that happen when using the standard over time. Unfortunatly, we got a bug somewhere in our travels that started providing symptoms in NYC. Black Friday was indeed Black Friday for us. We dont have much more recollection than being home in Atlanta. O...
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