One Drawback to Your Enhanced Driver's License

There is one very important feature about your Washington State Enhanced Driver's License that you should know. It's good for crossing the border into Canada and Mexico (and Bermuda and the Caribbean)--but only by land or sea. Not by air. If you're flying there, make sure your passport is ready to fly with you. 

Don't have an EDL? See my previous story, "So You Want an Enhanced Washington Driver's License": 

Seattle residents have two EDL choices: the downtown DMV office or what's charmingly known to the DMV as Seattle-West. At the Seattle-West (known to locals as "West Seattle") location, they only take walk-ins for EDL applications, and stop taking applications 30 minutes before closing (closing weekdays is 5 p.m., Saturday, 2:30 p.m.).

The subtitle of this story is, "I ruin my vacation so you don't have to," since I discovered this useful fact while failing to fly into Mazatlan this past weekend. I thought about renewing my passport by appointment (which you can do if you have proof you're traveling in 14 days or less), but I was also sick with the flu. As it happens, I was sick with the flu when I got my last passport pictures taken, so I've been officially red-eyed and pasty for a full decade, and couldn't face another ten years of that. It was also a courtesy to my fellow travelers. 

I was curious why the EDL was "good" for land or sea entry, but not air, as there didn't seem to be any obvious reason that RFID should fail to provide the same service in airports as elsewhere, so I called the Washington State Department of Licensing for background. Once again, I learned, the federal government is my nemesis.

After the passage of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, formerly informal travel got more complicated--no more just nipping across the border to and from Canada without the right documents. To address this, Washington State helpfully decided to adopt the EDL, which, as we've established, is good for driving or boating Canada-way. But the federal government has jurisdiction over air travel, and has refused to allow the EDL as a valid document, even though not doing so makes a mockery of consistent border control and ruins the vacation plans of the nation's less detail-oriented travelers.