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spots on earth. We might decide to stay there quite a while. We might take a room or a flat and hang around while I write a novel, in between admiring glaciers and kiwi birds and geysers and things. I might do a story with a New Zealand background, while I'm there and can check on the correctness of detail. Both of my readers must be pretty tired of the backgrounds I know now. I'm sure I'm sick of them."
    "What you need, honey chile, is not a new background; it's a new plot."
    I thanked her. Every writer needs honest criticism in his own home. We left it at that and turned our attention to visas and baggage.
    The theory with a visa is that you get hold of the consul of the country in question, obtain from him a set of questionnaires, fill them out, mail or take the completed forms with your passport and fee back to the consul, whereupon he looks over the questionnaire, determines from it that you are a safe and proper visitor, then takes a rubber stamp and stamps your passport: "SEEN." That is all that "visa" means, just "seen."
    This piece of tap dancing need not take more than a week or ten days if you wish to visit, let us say, Spain and nowhere but Spain. If you wish to visit several countries, it is still possible though tedious to accomplish in a short time provided you live in New York or Washington, D.C., and can take a few days off to walk your passport through from one consulate to another.
    In our case we wished permission to visit nineteen sovereign countries, possessions, or colonies. Allowing a none-too-safe ten days for each transaction by mail and multiplying by nineteen gave an answer in excess of six months.
    We had started our preparations to travel in mid June; it took until September to get passports and straighten out an itinerary; our first ship sailed in November. We had six weeks left in which to get visas. It began to look like one of those unsolvable mazes used by psychologists to induce frustration paralysis in laboratory animals.
    Our State Department puts out a document listing the visa requirements of (almost) all other countries. We discovered that many countries had abolished this kindergarten procedure for the ordinary tourist. Most of these enlightened areas were in western Europe, not on our schedule, but several of them were in South America. The list that remained would still require two to three months if done by mail from Colorado-but the fine print came to our rescue: British consuls could grant visas for other British Commonwealth countries where said countries were not represented by consuls of their own. About two-thirds of our remaining list was British Commonwealth area-good! We would send our passports to the British consul in Denver and clear up most of it in a few days. As for places like French Tahiti, and Dutch New Guinea, and Portuguese East Africa, if we ran out of time before sailing, we would pick them up in person at any of several national capitals-Santiago, or Buenos Aires, or Rio, or even Pretoria. We would not be daunted by red tape, no, sir!
    So we sent our passports to the British consul in Denver.
    We waited for a week and nothing happened. Finally we decided to drive to Denver and inquire. Perhaps I should have done so in the first place, but I was fighting a deadline on a novel which had to be finished before we left. In my own case, at least, a loss of one calendar day in a writing schedule equals a loss of three writing days.
    We arrived about one o'clock and found the consulate closed for lunch but a small sign informed us that it reopened at one-thirty. I spent the time trying to read "Come to Britain" posters through the glass door. At one-thirty-five a nice young lady with an English accent arrived in an apologetic rush, unlocked, and offered us chairs. We asked about our passports.
    She dug them out of a file; nothing had been done to them. Nor could she help us; we would have to wait until the consul returned from lunch. Any minute, now? Oh no, he was