This much closer to China

[aadler]

There were … issues, regarding our intended trip to China, to be there for the arrival of our second grandchild.

Boring explanation.

First of all, China requires any passport have at least six months left on it before they’ll allow entry, and Susan’s passport was to expire in September. So, we needed to send off to have her passport renewed in advance.

Then, when that passport finally arrived, the old passport didn’t come back. The old passport had her Chinese visa in it, and that was necessary to get a new visa. We called the company that had handled the passport renewal, and they said the process had the old passport coming back to us from a separate department (government) and by a different route. So, we then had to wait for that to happen.

Then, after waiting (it seemed like) forever for her old passport/current visa (which likewise expires in September, so it too needs renewing), I had to go through the online process to apply for a visa renewal. And, because my own visa expired last January, I had to do it for myself as well. We got the submissions prepared today, and FedExed the application, our current passports, and photocopies of the old visas to the company for the renewal.

If absolutely everything goes absolutely perfectly, we’ll get the passports back, with the visas installed, by the end of the month. Then will come the matter of getting airline tickets … which will cost more because we couldn’t get them in advance, which we weren’t going to do till we knew it would be, well, possible to go to China at all.

With everything running up against the deadline this way, we probably won’t be able to get in the stop in Ireland to visit our daughter on the way, as originally intended. The crisis came when we found out China requires that six-months remaining time on a passport; that, and me discovering my visa had expired (I thought it was still good for a while longer). So we’ll deal with matters as they are, and maybe check things sooner next time through.