A STORY ABOUT OUR VISAS

 this past weekend austin & i flew down to california for our visa appointment. i think we were both excited that it had actually come to that time & anxious to just have it OVER. it's been a seriously frustrating & stressful process, so to have it practically finished was so exciting.

we decided to fly down friday night so that we could go to our nephews first birthday & make a little trip out of it before flying out tuesday afternoon. before leaving utah we had checked & double checked & triple checked to make sure we had everything & had checked off everything that was on the consulates list of things needed for our appointment & everything was in order... & then after talking to another guy that will be attending i.e. we found out that we needed to have our marriage license & cedar's birth certificate apostilled. an apostille is truly a fancy word for a government stamp, which we had needed on other documents but never were told we needed it for our marriage license or cedar's birth certificate until the saturday before our appointment. talk about stressful.

we had sent all other documents almost a month ago & paid to have them expedited to make sure we would have them in time for our consulate appointment because we can't change it, & now we had to figure out what to do. the other major bummer is that if you if you need to get them back the day-of, you have to take them in yourself in the state the document is from. cedar was born in utah, we were already in california. &&& we needed them translated.

luckily austin found a place that would translate them in l.a. before we had the apostille as long as we sent them a picture of the apostille form asap & they could have them done by monday. so we e-mailed them over a copy of the documents & austin flew back to utah sunday night & went straight to the capitol monday morning to get cedar's birth certificate apostilled & then flew back to california monday evening to make it to our consulate appointment at 10 a.m. on tuesaday. meanwhile i drove to down town l.a. at 6 a.m. (i got there at 8:30. yay traffic), to an area i had no idea even existed (i swear i'm only as good as any tourist would be in l.a, but i've seen less) & got our marriage license apostilled.

we arrived at the consulate an hour before our appointment, as recommended & ended up waiting an hour after our set appointment time to be called up. so we got to spend two & a half fun hours at the consulate waiting for our 10 minute appointment. no joke. after going through everything with them, all i had to do was run across the street to get a new copy of my passport & we were done!

i am completely relieved to say that we managed to get it all taken care of, but still can't believe that it happened. the thing about consulates we've discovered, is that every consulate has different regulations & requires different documents, buuuut they do not clearly state which documents you do or don't need, & they never answer the phone.

but hey, it's over & done with & we got our visas, so that's all we could really hope for.

besides that mini-drama, we had a really great time in california haha. we did the normal things, ate at our favorite restaurant, got donuts from star donuts (the best spot in newbury park), had a bbq with friends & family, went to our nephew's birthday party & all the babies ran around screaming & playing with each other!



3 comments

  1. So glad you managed to get everything sorted! You look like you have the perfect little family!

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  2. oh my that sounds streeeeessful! i'm glad you guys got it all figured out!

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