DMV

Yes, those dreaded letters, probably as frightening as IRS, loomed for a few weeks when TLW (The Little Woman) made an appointment for our renewed licenses.

Now we have the same birthday almost to the day, I am born on the 6^th and she is born on the 9^th of the same month. She has accused me all our married life of being early. OK, I came a year and three days earlier than her.

The renewed license is “enhanced” as they say will be useful for when NY State changes over to needing a passport to travel domestically in 2018, as do all the other states. Also, it will hold more information about you, things you probably won’t know you are giving strangers. It will be a form of National Identification.

Enhanced driver's license—Acts both as a driver license and a travel document, but also with limits. The U.S. Passport Card (also known as a PASS Card) is a less expensive, wallet-sized version of a traditional passport—with a few travel-use conditions. 

PASS Cards come equipped with a microchip that assigns a distinct number to its owner. This number, through vicinity-read radio frequency technology, matches up with a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) database to promote more secure crossings with faster queuing.
Thus, your passport card acts as approved identification at border communities—for example, when you travel by land or sea crossings between the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, or the Caribbean)—however, it is NOT approved for air travel and CANNOT be used as an international travel document recognized worldwide.

Perhaps the biggest difference between a passport card and a traditional passport is that:

Traditional passports are valid for international travel by air, sea, and land; but
Passport cards are valid only for re-entering the U.S. at land borders or sea ports-of-entry from: Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, The Caribbean.

So, TLW made an appointment to get our enhanced license with the DMV for 9:15 am. The DMV requires an appointment instead of the poor suckers who just walk in and then have to wait. I enter with TLC and laugh up my sleeve, as mothers with children, hard hats, chicken coup cleaners, tradesmen of all walks enter and will have to be at the mercy of the DMV when they will be called on. Here we were, with an appointment, we would be in and out in NO TIME at all!

Almost immediately we were called up separately went through everything and told to sit and… WAIT! All those suckers that came in with us, well they were all gone.