Driver license déjà vu

We are at the Wal-Mart in Chehalis, Washihngton (map). We're here simply because it was the first convenient overnight stop north of Vancouver. Our regular readers may remember the last time we were here was to get our driver licenses and registration renewed back in May of last year.

Back then, we thought we'd be done with in-person visits to the Department of Licensing for another four years, when our current licenses expire. Since then, however, our mail-receiving service went out of business, forcing us to change our address and thus rendering the address printed on our licenses invalid. Up to now, this has not been a problem -- Washington is happy for us to have an obsolete address on the cards so long as it is correct in their computer (it is). It has even worked in our favor, as several casinos in the interim have happily keyed in the obsolete address when we signed up for players' club cards, thus causing any junk mail they send to be discarded by the postal service.

In a remarkable coincidence, however, Louise received word yesterday from our health insurance provider that they believe we no longer live in the state and are planning to drop us. To comply with their request for proof of residency, we must supply them with copies of utility bills or driver licenses with a current Washington address, and so we now must get new licenses issued with the correct address on them. All our bills go to a post box in South Dakota, where our electronic bill-payment service is located, so we can't use those, and our property in Washington that serves as our legal address has no mail delivery.

And so it is that we find ourselves about to depart the Chehalis Wal-Mart destined for the Centralia office of the Department of Licensing for the second time in the span of a year. In fact, today is just two weeks shy of the anniversary of that occasion. Speaking of anniversaries, today is also the seventh of our wedding; apparently the appropriate gift for the seventh anniversary is a watermarked plastic card with a photograph.

We are actually very thankful that we received this notice while we are here in the state. More often than not, these kinds of things happen when we are 2,000+ miles away, and it is a mad scramble to deal with things remotely. This is, of course, exactly what happened when our last mail service closed its doors, giving us only two weeks' notice.

Photo by coconut wireless, used under a Creative Commons license.