A quicker way would be to do it at a passport office in some major cites. I was going to do this last summer up in Washington D.C. We went to the post office to get more details. We wanted to do this because we wanted to go to London in August. The post-man then said it would be and extra 100 or so dollars to get it done in one day. Of course, Mom said no right away to that. Long story short, we ended up mailing it off sometime in September to get it renewed. Never got to go to London either. It came about 5 weeks later and I didn't ask for it to be expedited to like 4 weeks instead. I got to go to London that November.