What Time Is It When an Elephant Sits on Your Passport?

Regardless of whether a plague of travel-document-perching pachyderms is imminent (and, to be honest, we suspect that it isn't), for many Americans it's time to get a new passport. Unless further lobbying by the travel industry causes yet more changes to the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, American citizens will be required to show a passport in order to reenter the U.S. by air from Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean as of January 8, 2007. Since new passport applications take six to eight weeks to process, and you'll need to have your document with you when you leave the country in order to present it when you return, this is the ideal week for current non-passport-holding Americans with trans-border holiday season air travel plans to get their applications in. If you'll be driving or cruising out of the country at holiday time, you are still exempt from the passport requirement. Up until three weeks ago, the effective date requiring passports for non-air entry was slated for January 1, 2008, but recent legislation means it may be pushed as late as June 1, 2009. If we're still at IT, we'll post a reminder that March. Save the date.