Ahh, Those Glorious Bureaucratic Delays!

A lot has happened since my last post, including the sale of our house, two cars, and several pieces of furniture; the moving of nearly all the rest of our earthly possessions into a rather small storage unit (you truly don't realize how much stuff you have until you try to cram it into a tiny little room!); and of course the quitting of the jobs. To sum it up, we are now officially homeless, carless, jobless and "stuffless" - if that's even a word?? :-)

So now we're up to the present, and the latest bit of news: we were scheduled to depart for Belgium earlier this week, but after waiting a full 10 weeks now, our visas are STILL not ready! The consulate website puts the wait at 3 weeks, and our oh-so-helpful contact at the LA consular office originally told us it would be 8 weeks. On Monday we faced the critical deadline for changing our flights, and unfortunately we had to immediately re-book our flights for a specific date. Of course we have no specific date on which we know they'll be here, so the best we could do is move the date out several weeks in the hopes that we'll SURELY receive them in that timeframe.

So, our latest scheduled departure date is now August 22nd - let's hope that's the last flight change and the only snafu we'll have during this process!! In the meantime, we're sitting around my brother Mike and his fiance Peyton's house, trying to be somewhat productive and teach ourselves French, since we now won't have time to take the intensive course once we arrive like we had planned originally. C'est la vie!!