Did you know that, until recently, if you have so many visa stamps in your U.S. passport that you run out of room, you can get more pages added? You’d have to travel a lot to even know that. How many pages could you possibly need in ten years before it expires? Eric Oborski has one passport with 331 pages! Altogether, he’s used over 1,400 passport pages. Oborski has been an avid traveler since 1965, and eventually became a travel agent.
All that international travel put a real strain on Oborski’s passport. That’s where the loophole comes in: At the time, U.S. citizens could take their passport to U.S. embassies to have more pages added. Oborski got to know the staff at embassies in Tokyo and Bangkok because he was there so often. They began adding pages to his passport—no questions asked. Oborski claims that the U.S. policy that no passport could have no more than three sets of extra pages was just that: a policy, not a law. Soon, his passport was spilling over with new pages, all full of stamps and visas.
But that changed at the beginning of this year. New U.S. passports can contain only 28 or 52 pages, which means that no one will surpass Oborski’s record. That doesn’t mean he will travel any less. Read how Oborski racked up so many miles over the years at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Eric Oborski)