Here’s a lesser-known travel fact: Some countries will deny you entry if you have fewer than three empty visa pages in your passport. The life of a passport is 10 years but if you travel frequently, those pages fill up fast. Our standard procedure when we get near to full is to add extra pages,  easily done via an online application at travel.state.gov. (We just did it last month, and it took two weeks from application to receipt of old, fatter passport.)

If you’re in the same boat and thinking about adding pages, do it now. The State Department just announced that as of December 31, 2015 they will NOT be offering the service anymore. Instead, applicants will be given the thicker, 52-page booklet from the offset. Run out of pages and you’ll have to renew your passport entirely, which means losing all of those beautiful stamps.