I renewed my passport this June. The old one didn’t expire for another year, but living abroad it’s a good idea to renew early and allow time update your permanent residence card and such. Good thing I did allow the time, as my new card took 3 and a half months instead of the stated 4 to 6 weeks.

I did pick up my new card this week, so I’m officially done with the old passport. Together with my other expired passports, I now have a total of 5 passports in my possession. Each is about a decade, starting in 1985 with the 5th decade starting now.

There’s actually a 6th passport from 1979, but I apparently didn’t keep it. I got it for my AFS student exchange summer to Brazil, then in 1981 used it for my first visit to Germany to see my then girlfriend, now wife.

The 1985 passport has stamps for our German wedding in 1985, our move to Germany in 1991, and on the last page my first permanent residence sticker from March 1994.

The 1994 passport is green since it was issued abroad, at the consulate in Hamburg. The US has since stopped issuing passports abroad. It includes a sticker from Croatia from 1996 (part of an road trip with my R5 car, two bicycles and a tent through southeast Europe), and a US stamp from 2000 when we first took our son to visit at age 9 months.

The 2004 passport includes a lot of US stamps as we frequently brought our son to visit his grandparents.

The first stamp in my 2014 passport is a US stamp for my father’s funeral that October. There are not so many US stamps lately as we now enter the US with Global Entry, but there are a few stamps for North Macedonia where we have been recruiting employees.

My 2023 passport is my present passport. What adventures will it see?