Old Passports
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I was putting some papers away in one of my filing cabinets a few days ago and came across my file of old expired passports.
Old passports are so wonderful. Currently American passports expire after ten years. The stamps in the passports reminds one of the various trips one has taken over the years. And the evolution of the passport portraits really tells a story of how 
one has changed over the course of a lifetime.
Going through the old passports I see that I got my first passport in 1972. This one was issued while I was in the Army and was living in Frankfurt Am Main, West Germany. It was only good for five years. This first passport has stamps in it from Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Greece, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Mexico, Switzerland, and England. I was 22 when I got this passport.
I remember that trip to England in February 1974. We flew over “space available” for free on an Air Force cargo plane. It was the first time I had ever been to London. I was 25 years old at the time.
I got my next passport in 1989. I took my son to see London in June of 1989. We happened to be in London when the Chinese government killed all those folks in Tiananmen Square. My boy was 13 at the time. We took the tube over to the Chinese Embassy and participated in a demonstration supporting human rights. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989
This passport shows our trip to Cozumel, Mexico in June 1990 to go scuba diving, and also when I moved to the Netherlands in March 1993 to become the General Manager of the European Division of the company I was working for. It did that job for more than a decade.
This passport shows many trips to the United Kingdom going through the channel tunnel, and ones arriving in Manchester, Stansted, Edinburgh, Gatwick, Birmingham, and Southampton.
My next passport was issued in December 1998 by the U.S. Consulate General in Amsterdam. This passport has a great many trips to the UK, some by air, and others through the channel tunnel. Included are entries in Newcastle, Bristol, Prestwick, Edinburgh, and a trip I took to Dublin, Ireland in April 2003.
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Altogether my old passports show 29 times that I have gone to the United Kingdom. I remember one trip very well right after the Schingen Treaty was signed. Supposedly one no longer needed a passport to travel within Europe. The UK soon dropped out of this provision, but just to try it out I used my Dutch alien identity card to enter the UK. It worked.
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So all together this comes out to 30 times I have visited the British Isles. Virtually all were as a tourist. I guess two or three times technically I went on business, but even then I took the time to see lots of eye candy. I could visit Great Britain two or three times per year for the rest of my life and never get tired of it. It is such an amazing place!
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