Sometimes We Make Stupid Mistakes...

Unfortunately, I am going to have to bow out on my outlandish Facebook promise of posting once a day as I am off to Amsterdam tomorrow and can't guarantee that I will be anywhere near the internet nor in the right frame of mind to eloquently write anything...

In other news, sometimes we make stupid mistakes.

Sometimes we make stupid mistakes at inconvenient times...

At two am...the morning before I was scheduled to fly from Italy to London, I realized that my passport was not in its usual place.  I knew it had returned from Prague, where could it be?  I unpacked my bag, unrolling and unfolding the contents until I felt a strange bulge in the pocket of my freshly cleaned khaki pants.  My travel document, the one thing that can prove I am who I say I am in Europe, had been sent on a sudsy tumble through the washing machine.  

The mangled thing was a shadow of its formal self, and I panicked to say the least.  Ink was running, pages were separated from bindings, everything was in disarray, especially my 

Italian visa, which had essentially washed away and was now completely illegible.  I tried to dry it with a blow-dryer, which made things worse.

I got Mom and Dad on the phone and they called the U.S. State Department...apparently I might have some trouble, some unsympathetic woman claimed.

I fretted all morning on trains from Trieste to Venice, Venice to Treviso, and my friends got tired of reassuring me.  I pressed my passport in a book, which made it flatter, but not necessarily less "tampered with" in appearance.  After what seemed like an eternity, I finally made it to the Treviso airport and then fretted some through security.  Thankfully, I was not hassled or cavity searched.

I ate a sandwich and laughed at the ridiculousness of my previously worried state.

"We're going to London!" I shouted to my friends, sure that I was home free.

I continued toward my Ryanair gate, not more than a hole in a wall, when I realized that I had claimed victory prematurely, there was another line leading toward a fresh passport check.  I waited in the queue for non-EU citizens and held my breath.

Awaiting me inside a glass protected booth were two intensely uniformed Italian policemen, who looked like they meant business.  I slid my sorry looking document under the glass and waited to be hauled off to some dungeon.  The policeman reached my visa page, which looked like it had been purposefully scraped away, and gave me an appalled look.

"Ummm, when I was in Venice," I began nervously in Italian."

"Yes?"

"It was wet, and my passport became wet."

"It became wet?"  The more intense looking of the two officers asked me.

"Yes sir, it became wet."

"In the water?" he asked while making a gesture like I had dipped my passport into a cup of coffee, "like so?"

"Yes, like so," I answered, mimicking the dipping gesture which must have been a sight for the people in line behind me.  A pause.  I assumed it was dungeon time.

He took out some sort of drill-looking device and I prepared for him to slice my passport in half dramatically, but he did no such thing.  Instead, he started laughing.  He tapped his fellow officer to make sure he understood what was so funny.

"In the water.  Look at this, man.  In the water."  He repeated the Dunkin' Donuts move and stamped my passport multiple times with the drill.

"Enjoy London."