Happy Birthday Thread

Sorry for not responding sooner everyone, I've only just noticed this thread. But thank you all for the birthday wishes and Beth for starting it. The reason I didn't respond sooner is that I was travelling to Lanzarote on my birthday ( last Sunday ) and as I've decided to travel as light as possible I didn't take my laptop and didn't have access to Not606. ( For some strange reason I can no longer get on here via my mobile phone. It doesn't recognise my password? ) Not that it mattered that much as we didn't have a game.

As an aside, I was meant to travel last Thursday but wasn't allowed to fly as I was told my passport had expired? We booked the holiday back in October and when booking it I had to give the travel company ( TUI ) my details including those of my passport. My wife said to check my passport and to look up the government website and conditions of travel to Spain. I did this and my passport's expiry date was Mid July of this year and the website stated that I needed to have more than 3 months on the date of return. As I returned on Thursday 28th of March, I had the 3 months, so all seemed well.

We turned up at Gatwick and at the luggage check-in they were asking for passports before you even entered the snaking queues. This was unusual. My wife was first and was fine, when they checked mine the bloke looked at my passport and asked me to wait there while he went sought the advice of his supervisor. The supervisor came over and said I couldn't travel as my passport had expired. I said it hasn't, the expiry date states that it's valid to mid-July. He said that no the rules have changed for the EU countries and that they now take the date of issue as they no longer recognise passports over ten years old. My date of issue was 7th March 2014. He said if you was travelling anywhere else in the world I'd of been fine.

I said to my wife that she should still travel as there was no point in moping about the house and I'll try and sort things out and join her when I could. On arriving back home my daughter who was working from home said that she said that she checked on getting an emergency passport but the earliest appointment was in Newport in Wales on the Saturday ( I live in Surrey. ) She took my photo on her phone and sent off my details to HMS Passport Office in Newport who confirmed that I had an appointment to collect my new passport at 13:50 on Saturday. With that in mind I booked a flight for Sunday and the best time and price was with Ryanair from Stansted on Sunday.

I travelled by train to Newport on Saturday which was four hours each way ( the train broke down at Swindon, but fortunately they still saw me. ) and then got to Stansted on the Sunday and flew to Lanzarote, thankfully the flight was on schedule.

New passport's no longer give you extra months if you renew early. They only give you ten years from the date of issue. The expiry date isn't worth the paper it's written on.

Anyway, the point of this sob story is not to garner sympathy and getting the violins out. It's to warn anyone else who's travelling anywhere in the near future with six months or less on their passport just get a new one. It's not worth the pain, travel or cost ( £800 ) to go through what I had to.

SB pointed out to me that the BBC ran a story earlier in the week about this ...

Holidaymakers going to EU caught out by 10-year-passport rule - BBC News

 

Hotel Vik San Antonio, Puerto Del Carmen, Col.

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