Keeping Track of Documents While Traveling

When traveling internationally, one of my biggest fears is that we’ll lose our passports. We all have both a passport book and a passport card; however, the passport card can only be used when traveling by land or sea to Mexico or Canada (at least that was my understanding of the rules). When we fly to Mexico we’re required to use our passport books.

Traveling can be hectic, and traveling with children is guaranteed chaotic, especially when our flight check in time is often between 4-5am. A system that we use is keeping all of our passports, several ink pens, and any cash that we’re traveling with in a pencil pouch to make sure that we keep it all together. As you can see from the photo above, it’s not a fancy system or a fancy pencil pouch (this specific one came from the Dollar Tree and it has seen better days).

We keep the pouch in one of our backpacks on our travel days. We are diligent about putting the passports back in the pouch as soon as we’re done using them. We also put the boarding passes for any connecting flights and our baggage claim tickets in the pouch so all of the important travel day documents are in one place.

We keep ink pens in the pouch because there are often times customs forms that need to be filled out while on the plane for international flights. If I remember correctly, we’ve even had to fill out forms when entering Hawaii.

Then, when we get to our destination, we put the pouch in the hotel safe and leave it there until it’s time to head home.

In addition to keeping our passport books in the pencil pouch, I carry all of our passport cards in my wallet. The thought is if we’d somehow lose our passport books we’ll all have some sort of identification to help with the process of getting back home.

When we return home from our trip I go through the pouch, toss any trash, and then put the pouch, stocked with the passports and ink pens, in our safe at home so that it is ready to go the next time that we travel.