If you are planning a trip to Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean this year take note: The State Department says it will begin accepting applications February 1st for passport cards as alternatives to passports for Americans traveling to the aforementioned destinations.
The wallet-sized cards, which will be available to U.S. citizens by this spring, will cost $45 for adults and $35 for children. That’s cheaper than a regular passport, and adults who have passports will have to pay only $20. However, the passport cards will only be accepted for land and sea crossings between the U.S. and Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, and will not be valid for flights.
The new passport cards are part of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. I wrote about the first phase of the initiative, which went into effect last year. It requires U.S. travelers returning by plane from Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean to carry a passport. That led to the surge in demand for passports, and served as the impetus for millions of travel horror stories from travelers who waited in mile-long lines to secure the document.
More information on passport cards is available here.
NEW YORK’S REVAMPED TOURIST ATTRACTION
If you are looking for a great place to take your kids for hands-on lessons in finance head down to lower Manhattan.
You can skip the New York Stock Exchange (since 9/11 you can’t tour the place any longer anyway) and walk over to the Museum of American Finance. It’s located just a block from the NYSE and has just reopened after a $9 million makeover.
The revamped museum celebrates money (actually, it pays tribute to the world of finance) and its goal is to become a major tourist attraction in New York City and an educational destination for local school children.
The museum is the brainchild of John Herzog, a second-generation broker on Wall Street, who launched the museum after the ’87 market crash. For decades the museum was housed in a small space in the U.S. Customs House, but it has now expanded and its new home is the site of what had been the original Bank of New York building, which dates back to the 1700s.
Visitors to the newly refurbished museum can learn the basics about this country’s financial system. The building is filled with and an archive of mementos, artifacts and other memorabilia from some of the nation’s most famous financiers. It is also home to the original stock certificates from Ford Motor, AT&T and other famous companies. The museum also houses rare coins and gold bars and examples of high-denomination bills, such as $10,000 notes. There’s also souvenir tickertape from the greatest stock market crash in the nation’s history, which occurred on the morning of Oct. 29, 1929.
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