Adventures in Moving

We've had quite an interesting adventure obtaining our driver's licenses. On our third trip to the Driver's Licensing Office, we finally struck paydirt.



An interesting thing about Washington is that the business of licensing a vehicle is done at a different office than the business of licensing people to use them. Thus, unlike on the east coast where all this is happening in one place, there is no one doing triage at the front to point you to the right window.

The first hurdle is figuring out what documents to bring to prove residency. The web page is fairly hopeless, giving circular arguments about what documents are required. If you have A and B you can get a driver's license, but once you have a driver's license, you can get A (or maybe B). So we gathered up things that made sense to us and went to the DLO. There we found a fairly clear statement of what we needed...why wasn't this on the web? Naturally, none of the documents we gathered were on the list so we left to start over.

The first stop was to get registered to vote (if we could). The list said that this would be one of the two documents we needed to get our license. The people at the voter registration office were great and surprisingly, once we filled out a form and waited a few minutes, we were given a notarized form declaring us registered. We were told that the registration card would follow in the mail.

The next document was the letter from the postmaster acknowledging our office change of address. This we applied for online.

Once our change of address letters arrived, we headed off to the DLO again. This trip we took a number and waited. We learned two things: E learned that our notarized letter from voter registration is not sufficient to obtain an Enhanced Driver's License (good for federal ID). I learned that according to the simple (and much abused) machines, my eyesight was not good enough to pass the test. I needed to go to the eye doctor and get a form filled out.

The next day I was off to the optometrist to get my form filled out. Then we waited until our voter registration cards.

Armed with what we hoped was the right stuff, we made our third trip to the DLO. This time we seem to have struck paydirt. We now have a sheet of paper that serves as a temporary license (still carrying our Florida license for ID purposes). The real deal should arrive in about a week.

We are getting close to being verifiable residents of Washington. Things are certainly different here. Each of these trips took multiple trips to a numbered window for each of us. In fact, on the second trip, the first thing that happened for each of us was our info was taken and our pictures made. Then we waited a while to go to another window to be told that we were either blind or had the wrong information. And when we went back for the final visit, we started the process again from the beginning. Seems like a strange and inefficient way to attack the problem.

We still have more to do to get fully settled. We still have to visit the Global Traveler office at SeaTac to get that information updated before we leave the country again. Lots of running around to do to move in the US. It was easier to buy a car in Australia were we did not reside than to get a license in a state where we do.

Feel safer now?