Okay, so that is a slight misquote from “It’s a Wonderful Life” but I like it better than the actual line of “I’m gonna see the world…” This is mainly because I have been using the misquote to do Jimmy Stewart impressions since the first time I saw “It’s a Wonderful Life” with my sweetheart, Karalene. (To be honest, I never actually watched the movie until we were married, so it really has been since the first time I saw it. And I am told I do a pretty good Jimmy Stewart impression.) I think the quote is really an aggregation of “I’m gonna see the world” and “I’ll give you the moon, Mary.” (The scene is on YouTube – It’s a Wonderful Life Clip 2/9)
Now that Karalene is working for an airline, we have an opportunity to see the world – granted, we only fly for free (on standby) to destination in the US, so we aren’t quite seeing the rest of the world (yet), but we have been doing what we can to see places in the US.
So far, we have been to visit family in Texas, and travelled to Vermont, Puerto Rico, and Southern California. I’ve also been able to use Karalene’s discounts on other airlines to fly home to Montana for my mother’s and a good friend’s birthday. I am very proud that I did this all by myself.
My sister recently moved to Italy, and we have managed to work it out so we can go visit them at Christmas time! We are very excited about this. And funny enough, Italy is the first place Jimmy Stewart mentions after saying he is going to see the world.
The first thing we needed to do was get passports. You pretty much need a passport (or the limited passport card) to go anywhere outside of the United States these days. The passport card only takes of going to Canada and Mexico (and maybe the Caribbean? I’m not sure – (http://travel.state.gov/passport/passport_1738.html if you are really curious) so we needed the full blown passports.
To make it easier we did the whole thing at the closest post office that does this sort of thing. The downside is that the pictures probably cost more than you could get elsewhere, but sometimes one stop shopping is worth it, and I really felt like it was in this case.
They tell you it will take 6-8 weeks to get your passports (unless you pay the extra fee to have it expidited – I want to say that is $75 each) but we got in early enough that we knew we should be okay. I was incredibly surprised when they came a week and a half-later. Best $150 I never spent.
Mail retrieving went something like this (highly fictionalized for entertainment value):
Me: Hey we got very official looking things in the mail. I wonder what they could be?
Karalene: Maybe they are our mail in ballots.
Me: Maybe – but they are kind of thick for that… It couldnt’ be our passports, could it? (my suspicions ar being aroused)
Karalene: We did that only a week ago, they said 6-8 weeks, so it couldn’t be our passports.
Me: Well, I’m stumped.
Karalene: You could open them up and take a look.
Me: (without any hint of sarcasm) GENIUS!
Lo and behold – there they were. Two shiny new passports with way more pages in them than I thought passports had.
Although I’m glad that together and I Karalene will get to see the world, I look forward to when we can share those experiences with our children. You can keep the moon if I can have that.
