The same is true for Swiss ID cards.

Here in Europe, you can travel either on a passport or on an ID card. Every person has a right to carry both simultaneously.

The Swiss ID is also blue, plastic, with a photograph. I can scan my own ID card in as a sample and send it to you by email, but not right now. We are at our weekend place in the mountains, and I don't have access to a scanner here.

Originally Posted by Jayne B

Four pages (folded) will not work for the scenario. She needs to see at a glance that his face matches an understandable piece of official-looking identification.

There are more problems with your plot, Jayne.

When I travel to the U.S. and wish to rent a car in the U.S., I cannot do so with a Swiss driver's license. They won't accept it, because the text is not given in English. Thus, Europeans (with the exception of the Brits and the Irish) will need to get themselves an international driver's license (IDL) in their home country, before traveling to North America. The IDL is a white booklet of 20-30 pages, in which the information about the driver is repeated in about 20 different languages.

If a foreigner wants to buy a car in the U.S., he or she first needs to get a local driver's license, because no insurance company will issue even a temporary insurance on a privately owned car on an IDL. The IDL works only for rental cars.

I don't know whether these types of regulations are any different in Canada from the corresponding regulations in the U.S., but I suspect that they might be the same.

Thanks both Francois and Gilles for descriptions of the respective ID cards. One such will work nicely. No need to scan one as a general description is all that's needed.

No worries about the plot, Francois. This is a mere detail in a single scene. She's a suspicious civilian in trouble, he's a visitor offering help, not renting a car or doing anything official. Thanks for the extra information about the IDL, though. That could come in handy another time.

Back to the bloomin' manuscript. Yeesh. I'd much rather be watching something with vampires in it.

Jayne:

I just sent a scan of my Swiss ID card by email to your husband, as I don't have your own email address on the notebook that I am currently using.

A European ID card (plastic, size of a credit card) is not valid in North America as a document to cross borders, but it can be used as a picture ID, e.g. to identify yourself at a postal office for picking up a registered letter.

Here in Europe, all countries accept each other's ID cards as valid travel documents, i.e., I can travel anywhere in Europe on my Swiss ID card, i.e., without carrying a passport around ... similar to being able to cross the U.S./Canadian border on a U.S./Canadian driver's license.

Quote:

similar to being able to cross the U.S./Canadian border on a U.S./Canadian driver's license.

Ah, the good old days....