Re extra passport pages

Regarding extra pages for visas in your passport, I’d like to point out another problem.

Before my husband and I went to Israel in November ’06, I noticed that my passport (which had about 2½ years to go until expiration) had only four blank pages left, so I ordered extra pages from the State Department. I even asked for expedited service. My passport was returned in plenty of time (this was before the recent crunch) with an enormous amount of extra pages.

My problem was that the Israeli guards were very suspicious of the extra pages. “Where did you get these,” they kept asking. (We crossed the border a few times doing short excursions into Jordan and Egypt.)

I have to admit that I can understand their suspicions. From the appearance of the pages, it looked like I had just glued them in.

I suggest that if people expect to do a lot of foreign travel, especially now that passports are valid for 10 years as opposed to four, they order extra pages at the outset. The pages I had inserted by the State Department (at significant cost) almost caused more of a problem than if I hadn’t bothered.

MURA KIEVMAN

Brooklyn, NY