Fallen Souffle

After much toil and stress my sister is now in London. We can all breath a sigh of relief. As Evan and I said, once she is on the plane she is all on her own. You see my sister is a bit of a procrastinator, she kinda works on “Steph time”. So she didn’t think much about the fact that she needed to send in her passport renewal much earlier than anticipated because of the new restrictions the government has put on travel without passports. So she finally sent her application in sometime in March, thinking she would have plenty of time to get it back. The cash was checked at the end of April. Then about three weeks ago she logs into the State Department website and realizes her passport has not processed. She begins to freak out. She sends out emails to all Congress and House representatives, news stations, all the while staying on hold with the State Department which always seems to hang up on her. She finally gets a response from Thelma Drake who is now like a part of our family and may even get an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. Thelma and her staff get Steph the necessary paperwork and they call in and get her passport processed. Now the passport has been processed but it may not get mailed in time, so they suggest she make plans to go to D.C. and get another passport processed. Luckily, my Dad picks up some kind of Congressional letter that will put her at the front of the line so she doesn’t have to get there the night before to wait in line.

So she and my Dad plan a Father/Daughter day in D.C. which consisted of waiting in line for 2 hours, getting the paperwork processed, touring D.C. a little and then returning at 3:30 to pick up the all important passport. All the while keeping me and my Mom updated with calls and text messages.

So she is set for her trip. She returns to VB where she is to leave Thursday afternoon from Norfolk to Charlotte and then to London. Luck would have it that her passport that has been stuck in New Hampshire for god knows how long shows up in a FedEx envelope on my parent’s door step 2 hours before she leaves for the airport. That’s just the James luck. So now she is doubly prepared with two passports. It just figures.

Three weeks of living in London, touring museums, seeing shows…I am quite jealous. Let this be a lesson to all of your that are waiting to get your passport, they are anticipating passports are currently taking 6 months to get processed and mailed- so you should start the process yesterday if you are planning to go anywhere. Though me and my family now feel like passport experts so if you have any questions or problems let me know.

If you are in need of a new blog to read, Steph has set up a blog to chronicle her vegetarian eating adventures in London, thewanderingveg.wordpress.com. Hopefully she will keep it updated, it is sure to be quite a funny read.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.