Our passports came back on Friday with all of our visas ready to go! This was a crazy process to go through. Utah is assigned to the Los Angeles consulate, so we originally thought we'd need to apply for our visas there. The problem was, you had to appear in person (at least one person from your group) to apply and then return in person about 5 days later to pick up the visas. (Which would have meant two 1-day trips for Jordan or I, or a week long stay in L.A.) Or you can pay a visa agency to take care of it for you, but they charge (quite a lot!) for each person so our family of 6 would have been pretty expensive.
So then we found out that the San Francisco consulate (where Jordan's parents & April would be applying) would accept applications from outside their jurisdiction. (Yay - Winslow can apply for us!) But the problem there was that each person we talked to/ emailed had a different set of requirements that had to be met. Finally we decided the safest bet would be to go there in person - and we thought it would be more fun to spend the money on a Spring Break vacation than to pay someone to do the applications for us in L.A.
So, we had a great little vacation, and everything went smoothly at the consulate, and now we're one great big step closer to our big adventure!
