One of the (many!) things I need to do during 2026 is renew my Danish passport... as a Danish citizen who is a Permanent Resident in the USA.
This is a somewhat expensive and complicated process, thanks to all the new biometric security measures built into modern travel documents.
Aside from the approximately $200 for the passport itself, there's also the matter of how and where to get it, when you're in the USA. And, of course, the cost of getting there.
In my case, I have to travel all the way from my remote corner of Washington state to Silicon Valley in California for the renewal at the Danish Consulate there... which is the nearest consular station that has all the biometric gear to process passport applications.
From a practical perspective, that means taking a three-hour bus ride to the main train station in Seattle, then taking the overnight sleeper train to San Jose — which arrives at around 10:00am — stepping over into a local commuter train to Palo Alto (takes about 25 minutes) where the station is thankfully just a three minute walk from the consulate.
Then I show up for my appointment (of which there are only a handful, on each Tuesday and Thursday), eat a bit of lunch, take the commuter train back to San Jose and catch a 7:00pm overnight train that gets into Seattle at about 7:00pm the next day, and then take the bus back home, arriving by about 10:00pm.
All in all, somewhere on the order of 55 hours of travel.
So why not just fly?
Well, it's a cost factor thing as much as a "stress thing." I can actually just chill and do some peaceful work while on the train... and I have access to door-to-door transportation this way.
My new passport will be ready in about 6-8 weeks. The crazy thing is that they can no longer be mailed, even via secure courier, but thankfully they can go in the diplomatic lockbox to the smaller consular office in Seattle, where I can pick it up.
Hassles aside, I am glad to have a Danish passport because it still offers one of the greatest degrees of "travel freedom" in the world. In this strange day and age, that's a good thing!
Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful week ahead!
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Created at 2026.01.06 01:45 PST
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