Last year, I lost my passport somewhere between Beit She'an, a town near the West Bank, and Tel Aviv after making it through a border crossing between Jordan and Israel designed to discourage crossing. I must have lost it in one of three taxis we took back to Tel Aviv in the frantic race against Shabat when all transit would stop.

It was pretty easy to get an emergency passport from the US embassy, but along with my orginal went all of my stamps. The Zimbabwean visa I survived 28 hours on a bus for, the Namibian student visa I had an x-ray of my lungs taken for, the entry and exit stamps from a little island in the Pacific that may be as far away from home as I will ever get. Obviously, I need to get myself around the world again.

I left for this trip with a blank passport. This is my first effort to populate its pages with some new stamps.