The drive to Pittsburgh with my mom turned out to be calm and uneventful to my surprise. I had expected to be nervously sweating the whole way to the airport seeing as I was headed for a whole new continent and to meet the woman of my dreams. We stopped at Burger King, of all places, for my last meal in America for who knows how long. I had a chicken sandwich and french fries with a Coke. I can still taste it, and that isn´t necessarily a good thing because the grease in the deep frier was past spent and needed to be changed, or at the very least heavily filtered.
I ended up driving my Mom´s Kia Sedona for about 75% of the slightly over 6 hour trip. Bless her heart, she had school work due at midnight that night and not only had she not even started it yet but she would have to turn around and head 3 and a half hours south to reach her hotel room in West Virginia, where she had a job to do the next day, before she could even start it. My mom is a master of sacrificing for those whom she loves. I respect her because of that more than I have ever shown her. The airport in Pittsburgh itself was practically hidden away in the hills of Pennsylvania. It was pretty big, though it was no Denver or Atlanta that is for sure. I had flown across the U.S. a couple of years prior and flew in and out of Louisville, Denver, Tacoma, and Chicago. Now I added Pittsburgh to my list of American airports that I´d had the "pleasure" of experiencing. I will always remember the Denver airport as a small city in itself. Even Iceland´s main airport and Schoenfeld in Berlin didn´t come close in side or impressiveness. I remember thinking to myself that the rumors about a NWO headquarters being located under the Denver airport was perhaps not such an outlandish idea as some might suppose that it was. The line to go through TSA security in Pittsburgh looked massive, it stretched well past the roped off waiting area. To my surprise it took less than 25 minutes to get up to the agents. Another short 10 minutes and I was through the body scanners, tying my boot laces, and shoving my laptop back into my computer bag. Shouldering my backpack I headed towards C60, it was the furthest gate in the entire place to my knowledge. Arriving to the terminal I began to remove my passport and tickets from my pocket and as I did so, to my great surprise, the lady behind the desk pulled out a microphone and spoke into it with saying something like, "Jordan Quinn, please come to the service desk at gate C60." I was so nervous they were going to tell me I couldn´t fly out of the country for one silly reason or another... nothing is surprising anymore. Thankfully it turned out to be no big deal. A couple from the Netherlands hadn´t been able to secure seating in the same row and had asked if they could switch tickets with me. I obliged even though at first I was a bit disappointed knowing I had lost my window seat for my first flight across the Atlantic. Oh well, that´s just the way things go sometimes I told myself and truly I felt blessed regardless, after all I was getting to leave the country and pursue the life I truly desired. Nothing could bring me down. 20 or 30 minutes after our scheduled boarding time we were finally on the plane and ready to go. The flight was slightly over 6 hours long, it is the longest flight I´ve been on so far to this day. I will never forget coming into Iceland, it was still dark but the sun was just beginning to lighten the sky enough to make out the dark waves below. The coast was lit up with lights and a boat or two was bobbing up and down in the water. It was truly a pleasant sight. Due to being the middle of December it was pretty chilly out in the open air of Iceland, though it was far from the sub artic tempatures the name of the place tends to mislead people into anticipating. To my understanding, Iceland is more green than it is Ice, and Greenland is more Ice than it is Green... point being, don´t judge a book by it´s title! The flight leaving Pittsburg had been delayed, so was the flight leaving Iceland. I landed in Berlin almost a full hour late. I had basically two hours to figure out how to get 25 or 30 kilometers across the city to the main bus hub in order to catch my bus to Zagreb. This is when my phone decided to stop accepting wifi from any source what-so-ever. Talk about fighting panic. I tried for 30 minutes to find a signal that I could connect to before I realized it was futile and just started asking random airport workers and security for directions. After speaking to 5 or 6 individuals I finally talked to a guard who pointed me to the train station. I had been looking for a shuttle bus and now changed direction. It was well after 1pm and I was trying to catch a bus out of the country at 2:30 PM. I ended up paying triple what I needed to for my train ticket (7.5 Euro instead of the 2 Euro it should have been) because the ticket machines were in German and I couldn´t google translate anything with my phone being out of service and unable to connect to wifi. On the first train I spoke to a couple of guards who again pointed me in the right direction to catch the next train which would finish carrying me across the city and deposit me about 1 block from the main bus station. I got off where they told me, I found a local buying a ticket at one of the machines and recruited his help in purchasing mine. I couldn´t actually understand what he was saying, and he pretty much just took the money from my hand and did it for me. I was paranoid that he was giving me the wrong ticket but it ended up being exactly what I needed. 20 minutes later I was off the second train and headed towards the bus station. It was 2:30. The buses left while I was standing in the rather large and slow moving ticket line. The next bus wouldn´t be leaving for Zagreb for 7 hours! I was depressed at first, like with giving up my window seat on the plane from Pittsburgh, but quickly recovered when I looked around and realized I was in Europe and half of my journey was over. I had driven several hundred miles, flown several thousands, and now would take a 900 mile bus voyage to finish it up. I walked around Berlin a bit, never straying to far from the familiar streets directly near to the bus station. I walked into a couple of stores, checked out a couple of food places, took some pictures like any other lame tourist would, and even paid to use the public bathrooms for the first time in my life. I had a tiny bite to eat and smoked half a pack of cigarettes while I waited for bus number N60 to show up. I was never so happy to step onto a bus in all of my life. It was also the first double-decker bus I´d traveled on. Way cool, much nicer than the Greyhounds or Coaches back in the States. Austria, the Czhek Republic, and Slovenia passed pretty quickly. The 16 hour bus ride didn´t seem nearly so long as it actually was. I don´t quite remember where all we stopped other than Prague and Vienna, both of which I pretty much adored due to the vast differences in culture and architecture as well as the general energy. Europe is nothing like the States. Finally I reached Zagreb after the hour plus long wait in bus terminal at Vienna. I saw Zvjezdana waiting for me on the curb and my heart melted on the spot. TO BE CONTINUED...
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I decided on Monday, November the 27th, that I wanted to try to apply for an expedited passport and was standing at the service counter at the Chicago Passport Agency being approved for one two days later on the 29th. In this blog post I will describe to you the details of that particular mini-quest.
The round trip bus ticket form Louisville to Chicago and back cost $81 online, or $127 in person at the Greyhound station itself, whatever sense that makes. Scheduled boarding time was supposed to be 2:45 am, with a departure set for 3:05 am, but the incoming bus was a good hour late. We ended up rolling out of Louisville and over the river into Indiana around 4:20 am. We had a 45 minute stop-over scheduled at Indianapolis which was turned into an 8 minute stop due to running behind. I relieved my bladder, bought a coke from a vending machine for $2.50 (to torture it some more), and a Twix for another $1.75 from another machine. The only plus to over-paying for that junk was that someone had paid it forward (intentionally or not) with a bag of BBQ potato chips left in the bottom of the vending machine for me to help myself to (which would have been another whopping $2.00 otherwise). We re-boarded and headed out for Lafayette and Chicago without event. Once on the open roads and flat lands of Indiana we eventually made back up the rest of our missing time and arrived in Chicago precisely at 8:40 am(9:40 am back in KY), five minutes ahead of time. The bus stop wasn't too crowded that time, when I came back later that afternoon was a different story. I relieved my aging bladder once again and made my way out onto the streets of Chi-Town, but only after a somewhat fair priced large cup of coffee from the only food joint in the place. The coffee was $2.50. Harrison and Jefferson was the first intersection that I came too, which took practically two steps to reach from the front doors of the bus station. I had my phone out with google maps pulled up and the passport agency on 101 W Congress Parkway punched in but my data was extremely slow and I was having trouble locating my cardinal directions to get headed correctly towards my destination. Two locals were posted up on the corner hustling something or another and I decided to ask them if they knew which direction W Congress Parkway was located. Unfortunately neither one of the men knew which direction the street was, and neither of them had any clue where the passport agency was located so they weren't too helpful at all. Oddly enough, the next twenty minutes to half an hour was one of the brightest moments in my day due to just standing on the corner kicking it with them as human beings. I didn't matter to them that I wasn't a gang banger and that I didn't have tattoos (or that my skin was a different color), and It didn't matter to me that they were obviously peddling something they probably shouldn't have been. After some point I asked which way down Harrison the river was, thanked them, and made my way onward. It's always refreshing to meet cool people, but to be able to openly discuss politics, the world, and things that truly matter with people who truly understand will always be the experiences I treasure the most. And isn't that really what traveling is about to degrees? Exploring new places, discovering new cultures, having unique experiences and expanding our understanding of people and the world as well as raising our levels of appreciation towards it. I remember that I felt blessed for the type of day that I was having. Stopping on a bridge along Harrison I snapped a few photos of an on-coming boat in the water below. It appeared to have a small dinner party of about 8 people in action on the main deck that was visible. A man walking a Scottish terrier, a man jogging, and a woman on a bicycle all passed me one by one while I was taking my time and enjoying the view around me. I followed Harrison until I reached S Financial Place and I hooked a left. At the next street I hung a right and I was on W Congress Parkway, my destination reduced to less than a 10 minute walk and before I knew it I was standing in front of the doors to the Chicago Passport Agency. I decided (very unwisely so) to go find a place to get something to eat, a cup of coffee, a pack of cigarettes, or possibly all of the above. I thought about searching up food places near me but remembering how slow my data had been earlier I skipped it and just starting walking in a random direction. Possibly two blocks away, if even that far, I came to a fairly busy intersection with a small gas station on the other side of W Congress Parkway and crossed over. One pack of cigarettes and a medium sized (horrible horrible horrible) coffee came to a total just over $15.50. I honestly wanted to be shocked that cigarettes in Chicago were more expensive than in Seattle or the Capital city, though I can't say that it actually surprised me at all. Returning in the direction of the Chicago Passport Agency, I sipped my coffee and enjoyed a cigarette. I had plenty of time to kill, almost two hours until my appointment, so I walked around a couple of city blocks for an additional half hour, explored a bit of subway, and headed back a good 45 minutes before I was scheduled to be. The entrance itsef was mostly glass with a bunch of security. I believe I counted 5 guards in the main area before being pointed to a hallway on the side of the room. At the end of hall was another security check-point which I had to remove my jacket, pocket change, and everything else including my boots before passing through the scanner. I found a bathroom a short distance down the hall from the elevators that sat around the corner and just beyond the security check point where I relieved my bladder once again, half the reason I decided to come in so early in the first place was that I couldn't find a public restroom and my bladder was again more than full and needing some serious relief. I washed my hands and headed up to the 9th floor where the application acceptance area of the Passport Agency was located and got in line. Two people were in front of me and in just about five minutes time I was presenting my documents to the first Agency employee. A quick look-over of my things and they were handed back to me and then I was pointed to another line. There was only one person in front of me and it was fairly fast. Once I was called to one of the probably twenty service windows my things were again gone over and handed back to me along with a ticket with a number and then I was told to have a seat. 10 or 15 minutes passed before I was called again. The actual acceptance agent who ended up helping me (Corey R.) was super proficient and after inspecting my birth certificate, state i.d., and travel itinerary I was approved and ready to go in a very short time. I was told that typically I could have taken my passport home the same day except that their printers were malfunctioning at the moment and I would have to have it overnighted for an additional $15.45. The overall service was fast, friendly, professional, and honestly the last thing I expected from a government facility of the sort. The total cost, $210.45, consisted of the $110 for the passport book, a $25 execution fee, a $60 fee for expediting services and of course the additional charge for overnight shipping with FedEx. Getting your passport can be quick and painless, though the thought itself may seem like some next to impossible task. It's really quite simple. The first you need to decide where you are going and research your destination. Look at things like the cost and location of hotels and food joints, and don't forget to look at all of the possible modes of transportation to travel before making a decision. The price differences between a bus, a plane, a boat, a train, and driving yourself are considerably large. It also doesn't hurt to take a few minutes and write down a few cab companies ahead of time. The second thing you will need to do is to gather the necessary documents for proving your identity. You will need your birth certificate and your state, government, or military identification card as well as a fully completed DS-11 form (the form for first time applicants - renewing a passport will require an even easier form that you can find here) which can be picked up from select post offices which act as passport agencies, from regional passport agencies themselves, or downloaded and printed off from various locations on the internet. Next you'll want to stop and make sure you have steps one and two completed, just keep in mind that whether it takes hours, days, weeks, or months to get your passport is ultimately going to be up to you. Create a checklist for yourself, mental or otherwise, and go over everything with a fine-toothed comb. Your only going to have to do this once, take your time, you don't want to be denied for writing the wrong date for your father's birthday and miss that trip to the Bahamas with your girlfriend like I did when I first applied 15 years ago. Third, your ready to make an appointment with the US Passport Agency nearest to you (you can locate the one you need here). They seem to be pretty decently dispersed across the country. After you select the one you want to visit you can make an appointment by calling the national passport appointment hotline @ , or you can simply request an appointment via an online wizard here. The fourth and final step is planning and carrying out your actual physical journey to the Passport Agency that your appointment is scheduled with. Make sure that you arrive 15 minutes early because your appointment can be deleted/denied after you are 15 minutes late or more but I suggest going in even earlier if at all possible. I arrived 45 minutes early for my appointment and I was actually done with the entire process and back out of the building in one hour flat. The Chicago Passport Agency was truly a well oiled machine the day I was there but I can not speak for the facilities in other cities or testify for the experience of applying normally through the post office or mail. Best of luck if your applying for your first-time passport. Slow down and do it right and it'll be a breeze! Feel free to comment with any questions! Thanks for reading, happy traveling! A message from US Passport Agencies: Proof of immediate international travel, the Expedited Fee, and an appointment are required for each application submitted in person at a Passport Agency or Center. To schedule an appointment, visit the Online Passport Appointment System. You may also call the National Passport Information Center 24/7 at 1-877-487-2778 (1-888-874-7793 TDD/TTY). OR To check the status of your application: https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/passports.html |
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December 2018
AuthorWriter, nature lover, poet, pagan, occultist and blogger. Categories
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