Meet the Man With the Largest U.S. Passport
Oct. 15, 2010— -- Sanjeev Midha loves to take his family on lavish, multiple-month international vacations. Each year, he sets aside $150,000 to $250,000 just to travel the world. Clearly, money isn't an object for the owner of a technology company.
But space in his passport for all those stamps is.
Most travelers never think twice about the size of their passports. Only about one in every three Americans even has a passport, according to the U.S. State Department.
But Midha has had to add page after page to his, which at 96 pages, is considered one of the largest in the United States. He had to get a new one in 2009, because it was full and Midha, 49, couldn't add anymore pages.
"Each page was crowded, crowded, crowded. There were stamps, stamps, stamps. We travel as a family, a lot," he explained with modesty.
And these vacations involve a lot more than sitting on a beach or riding an elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
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"I strongly, strongly believe in experiences. We do a little bit of sightseeing, like most people," he said, "but we like to eat only local food, go to local people's houses for dinner and try to speak local languages as much as possible."
Take this past summer. Midha, his wife, Sunita, and their two sons Ashim, 18, and Akhil, 16, spent nearly 3½ months on the road. (Ashim recently graduated from and Akhil attends the private Peddie School, in Hightstown, N.J., which has six-day school weeks but lengthy breaks.)
The family started in Paris, journeyed through the Champagne and Burgundy regions of France, then hopped around Switzerland -- Geneva, Bonn, Zermatt -- before heading to Italy. After spending some time in Torino, Verona and Venice, they moved on to Austria, stopping in Salsburg and Vienna.
Midha and his family then flew to Istanbul and on to eastern Turkey before heading west to Barcelona just in time to see Spain compete in the World Cup finals. A few days hopping around Spain -- Valencia, Toledo and Segovia -- and the family headed back to its New Jersey home for a night.
