Fun fact: I am still in Portland. My flight to Geneva left this morning without me. No worries, I have one tomorrow morning but that means I will arrive in Switz 26 hours after everyone else meets for the first time. It’s part my fault, part FedEx’s fault, and part the Consulate’s fault, but it all traces back to my passport.
Getting a visa is hard work, and I had to do it from two different countries. It took a long time for me to get authorization and to determine what I had to send in with my passport - did you know that the San Francisco Swiss Consulate will talk about visas for only one hour in the afternoon? I sent in my passport via two and three day mail (that’s where I am at fault. Now I know to always send important things overnight) and apparently three FedEx days are four normal person days.
So yesterday my lovely mother sat at home all day waiting to sign for my package while I spent hours trying to find a way to track a package without a tracking number only to discover it was supposed to be delivered today. The day that I was supposed to be on a plane. We were able to cancel my plane ticket and find another one for a fairly good price (but a day late because flying eastward from the West Coast is not easy) so I’ll get to Geneva no matter what. It’s not the end of the world, no matter what I thought last night, distraught, sobbing, and sick to my stomach with guilt.
Now I have a free day and there are all sorts of silver linings to this bad news bears cloud (got to see Portland snow, watching lots of Downton Abbey, more chances to eat mom’s lemon bars). I am just hoping that this will be a funny story in May when I can look back on this trip as a whole. Here’s to getting rid of all my bad travel luck before I even leave my house! x
Oh, I hope it's smooth from here on out! I had a horrible time getting my passport renewed last time (with a time deadline...I got it the day before I left!). For some reason they couldn't verify who my father was and I had to send copies of birth certificates and all sorts of things. Of course, this was after they'd issued and subsequently renewed it twice before - with nary a question of who my father might be!
ReplyDeleteThat is so weird, Sarah! When I applied for a passport for the first time, they told me I had the wrong birth certificate; apparently the one I got at birth just wasn't good enough haha.
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