How the heck do you do a move in via airplane? We won’t be—anything that needs to be bought for the dorm, we buy in Pennsylvania. (We’ll be on the east coast about a month before orientation for a family reunion, so we might buy some stuff then and stash it at my sister-in-law’s house, but probably not.) D17 will bring one large suitcase of clothing, but that’s pretty much it. The heavy-enough-for-here winter coat will stay at home—we figure we can bring it to the airport when we pick her up for winter break.
Credit cards: D17 is not yet 18, but she is an authorized user of my Delta Amex and my wife’s Alaska Airlines Visa—that way she has a way of making emergency purchases, we get informed of any purchases she makes, and we get a few extra miles. She doesn’t plan to get her own credit card until at least a couple years into college.
Speaking of credit cards, foreign transaction fees: More and more cards are dropping them—Alaska Airlines’s Visa, which is administered by Bank of America, dropped them about a year ago (right after I took a trip to Europe, by the way), and Discover (not widely accepted outside the United States, but where it is it usually does business as Diner’s Club) hasn’t for several years now.
More on foreign travel and credit cards: Credit cards are much less widely accepted many places than in the USA, and whereas in the USA if Visa is accepted somewhere Mastercard is also, in most of the world they’re on entirely separate networks and you actually need both in your wallet. (I usually just withdraw a bunch of cash from an ATM when I get to my destination, though.)
Health care paperwork: We’re starting to pull everything together (for a May birthday). The plan is to have her out of school the morning she turns 18 so that we can go to the local Kinko’s and get the ones for Alaska that need to be notarized notarized, and sometime this summer (either while we’re out that way for the family reunion or right before orientation) to draw up any needed for Pennsylvania that aren’t covered by the Alaska ones. (Still need to research whether there’s any need for that.)
Goodbyes: D17’s orientation week comes while I’m locked onto my campus with various administrative meetings and such (it’s the week before D17’s classes start, which begin the same day I start teaching), so my goodbyes’ll be at the airport. Probably no tears there—neither of us are into big public emotional displays. My wife’ll be traveling there with her, though, and she is subject to big public displays of emotion, which might well start D17 crying. The goal for both of us, though, is to make the moment of parting relatively brief and clean.
