Passport panic and can-do kids

My family often celebrates milestones with travel. Spring of 2005 saw two significant birthdays and two graduations, and a family trip to Italy was our journey of choice.

My husband, son and I were flying out of Seattle. Our daughter, who was living in another state, was leaving a day later and meeting us in Rome. It just happened that we were flying on our son's 18th birthday.

Our check-in began with a passport scan. An airport assistant pulled us aside. This was post-9/11, so I assumed there was some security precaution. The look on his face, and his next statement, soon told me otherwise.

"Oh, no ... your son's passport is expired."

Children's passports are only good for five years. It was one of those obscure bits of information that had been floating around in the universe waiting for a moment when I would remember it. This was not the moment I would have chosen.

"Sorry, he's not getting on that flight. ... The soonest we can get you all out is Tuesday." (This was Thursday and these were tickets acquired with airline miles.)

We realized that our daughter would arrive in Rome the next day. The obvious decision seemed to be to go ahead without our son and work on getting him there.

After three calls and an automated shuffle, we concluded that robots run the passport system. The best we could do was an address in downtown Seattle.

A phone call to a credit-card company added our son's name to our account (to pay for the later flight to Rome when and if he managed to get a passport).

We reached the security point, and I hugged my youngest child, and then headed off without him. It was only after we were seated that we had second thoughts about taking ourselves out of communication for 10 hours and sending our son off with a few bucks on an unknown journey. But at 10,000 feet, at about the time my son was turning 18, I had an epiphany. He would be OK.

In the meantime, our son had called his sister, and they had formulated a plan. She had taken on Northwest Airlines and convinced them to issue him (free of charge) another ticket for the following day, arriving in Rome a half-hour after she did. She did this from her car on the L.A. freeway.

Meanwhile, he had taken a taxi downtown, located the passport office, found a nearby Kinkos to get a passport photo, and somehow rounded up the required paperwork, tapping into his sister's e-mail account to get a necessary copy of our itinerary. He broke the passport barrier in under three hours. Only because he turned 18 that day was he able to get it without our signatures.

When we opened our first bottle of wine in Rome that night, we toasted the week ahead that would be shared with our children; significantly more meaningful than it had been 24 hours earlier. It was with a great sense of wonder and pride that we realized they would both be arriving capable and traveled adults.

We were certain as we headed to the Rome train station to greet the kids the next morning that our vacation surprises were behind us. Things would surely go smoothly from here.

And then we heard the bells announcing the death of Pope John Paul II ...

Rita James lives in Anacortes.

The Travel Essay, written by readers about an adventure or insight, runs each Sunday in The Seattle Times and also online at seattletimes.com. Essays, which are unpaid, must be no longer than 600 words and will be edited for content and length. E-mail to travel@seattletimes.com or send to Travel, The Essay, The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111. Because of the volume of submissions, individual replies are not always possible.