So a while back I shared how I managed to lose Mike’s driver’s license in Florida, which we realized while in Texas. We had Mike’s dad send it on to my friend Tina in Colorado thinking we would make due until we made it there. Unfortunately, those plans we foiled by another discovery.
While in Tucson, Mike tried to use his passport as ID and found out that it was expired – something we never thought about at all before heading out on the trip. Our plans for Canada or Mexico would have come to a grinding halt very quickly when we tried to cross either border! This then led to some refiguring of our plans.
Doing anything that involves printing or mailing (especially receiving mail) can be a bit arduous while on the road. The two things we now needed to do were: renew Mike’s passport so we may still be able to get to Canada in the near future and get a driver’s license back in possession ASAP. Both of these things took way more work than we thought they would.
In order to get the passport renewed we had to get the renewal form from a post office and then mail it in with new passport photos. Unfortunately, we were trying to take care of this during Mike’s work days while staying in Las Cienegas, which was an hour from a Walgreens (passport photos) or a post office. I managed to take the pictures and get them printed according to all of the requirements via a passport photo app and Walgreens. The trip to the nearest post office revealed that only post offices that process passports carry the forms so that required a drive way further into town to acquire one. Everyone just prints them off at home nowadays!
We just kept being foiled by little things on this endeavor. Once we had the form filled out and photos in hand, we had to staple the picture onto the form. And of course we didn’t have a stapler… and didn’t particularly want one. In an effort to make things as hard as possible for ourselves, we hit up three stores on order to wind up with two small staplers (the first one didn’t include staples) and some staples only to figure out that neither tiny stapler reached far enough into the paper to staple all four corners of the pictures. So we wound up just asking a postal worker at the deadest post office we had ever seen (Chiriaco Summit, CA) to staple it for us before we mailed it… which we could have just planned on in the first place.
And then the driver’s license. We decided that it would be best to have Tina get the license to us soon since Mike had to send off his old passport in order to get a new one. It had taken 4 days for the license to get from Florida to Colorado, so we figured that having it sent to a post office near Joshua Tree should work out just fine. It took a while to figure out which post offices receive general mail delivery, but after some research, I figured out there was one in Indio, CA, about 30 minutes from where we would be staying south of Joshua Tree. Perfect.
Of course, then we decided that it would be better to move to the north side of Joshua Tree for Mike’s work days. We stopped at the post office on the way up, but the license had not arrived yet (5 days after being mailed). I drove down the next day (an hour either way and a whole bunch of gas at California prices) and it had still not come. We pushed back our leave a day to drive down one more time just to find out that it still had not arrived.
And this is when we decided to give up on general delivery and that we were not willing to waste more time or gas on trying to retrieve the license.
Online, we found out that we could get a replacement license for about $14. Yes, we needed an address to send it to, so it would be sent to Tina again in Colorado, but in the meantime, Mike got a PDF of his license that was official enough to work as proof of license in the meantime.
We don’t always find the fastest or easiest ways to get things done, but we manage to make it all happen somehow. I’ve had a few people ask what I do during Mike’s work days and this is a glimpse into how some of that time is spent. It takes a lot of time and effort to do things that are quite easy from a fixed address with accoutrements like a mailbox and a printer. Grocery shopping or laundry can take some effort and even finding decent tasting water can take some work in the desert.