If you are like me, then you love your passport stamps. I love to flick through the pages of my passports and recall all of the wonderful places I have been. Stamps can bring back great memories. Stamps can also just be cool. However, nothing drives me more crazy than when renegade border agents stamp over other stamps so you can’t tell what they are anymore. Thats why I always ask them to stamp in a specific place or page.

When you travel a lot, your passport becomes very special to you and you take your stamps seriously. My old passport was made up of four passports jammed into one with all of the supplements that were stuffed in. I loved it and when I filled up the fourth supplement I was very upset because that meant I had to get a new one; since there was no more room and they couldn’t possibly get another supplement in there.

That aside, there were so many stamps in there that were stamped over previous stamps that sometimes you couldn’t read either of them. Especially in Europe they do this. Most European stamps look the same. The European Union has uniform stamps for many member countries with the only difference being the little letter in the corner and the port of entry name to distinguish the country. The other problem with European stamps is that they almost always come out light or dull and a lot of times you can’t see what it says very well. I realize that sometimes they do come out and it can be luck if they have changed the ink recently or not but it seems to me that more often than not European stamps are very dull.

As a result of these horrible acts of “overstamping”, I have adopted a policy of always asking the agent to stamp on a particular page or in a specific spot. They kind of look at you like your nuts or a control freak (as I was recently called while crossing the Gibraltar border) but I don’t really care and then you get a nice clear stamp that you can always recognize.

The only problem is when you get a miserable border guard who doesn’t even pay attention and just opens up randomly to a page and just stamps carelessly. It could be on top of other stamps or even worse, it could be in the back of the passport away from all of the other stamps. Oh man do I hate that, haha.

I know that a lot of people will read this and think I am nuts or being petty but believe me, if you travel a lot and have many stamps-this will drive you nuts. All you can do is be nice to border agents and a lot of times they will do exactly what you ask of them with regards to stamping but sometimes you get that guard who won’t be told what to do and will just stamp randomly. Obviously I hate that but nothing is worse, absolutely nothing is worse than if they refuse to stamp you…and yes this has happened to me a few times and it can be infuriating but thats another story for another day.

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