Rejected! Just two days after we submitted all our paperwork, the consulate returned our paperwork with no visas inside. Instead we found a note stating they wanted additional information (information that was not originally required). I think it had to do with some confusing wording on one of the documents we submitted. Once we gathered the additional info and revised the letter, we resubmitted. It wasn’t immediately rejected like last time, so we were feeling good. Sure enough, On January 29th, they approved our visas. Yippee! Brazil, here we come!!
The only hitch is that our visas were stamped as starting on their approval date and not the date of March 15th as we stated on our application. Roberto in Brazil said that wasn’t a big deal. They should be able to get it changed when we get in country as he’s had that happen with some of the interns that serve there. So whether we come home January or March, we are headed to Brazil.
We bought our plane tickets. I convinced Trevor to fly Premium Select with Delta. Yay! So we get a little more room and priority boarding. Trevor is 6 foot 4 inches, making the seats in coach or even Comfort+ pretty uncomfortable. Although, he is very budget conscious and would have flown in coach without blinking. The thing that tipped the scales was that coach doesn’t allow free checked bags and Comfort+ only allows one. With the Premium Select, we get two checked bags a piece. Seeing as how we are going to be gone for a year and would have a lot of bags and the less baggage fees we have to pay for the better. That made the price difference smaller so he was more willing to buy the tickets. We are flying on an Airbus A330-300, which means in the Premium Select seats there are three sections, two seats on each of the side sections and three seats in the middle. That means we booked two seats on the side in one row and two seats in the row behind us. Now we don’t have to crawl over anyone (other than each other) to go to the restroom or whatever. Bonus!
We head to the airport on March 19th and land bright and early in Brazil on the 20th.
Now we have starting making our packing list and working on our phone situation. We have AT&T and when we went to Brazil back in September, we just added the International Day Pass and our phones worked just fine. We didn’t need to do anything different with them. We will be gone too long to continue to use that and the International monthly plan (which covers Brazil) is only available if domestic usage exceeds international usage. Which, obviously, we will exceed every month because we won’t be home to make any domestic calls. We are looking at porting our numbers to a virtual number that will forward to our number, but there in lies another problem, money. We need to be able to get to our funds in the US. The banks use two-factor authentication and they see virtual numbers as a fraud risk and won’t always send messages to them. Uugghh. We found a company that will give us a US number and forward to our phones. We thought we were good but now the company is having an issue with sending texts. As of this point, we are still waiting to see if they can get the issue fixed.
Our dog situation, has not improved. It looks like they will need to be adopted out by an agency. We are heart broken. This stinks so bad. The boys don’t know this yet. We are waiting until the very last minute to tell them, just in case we find someone. I’m pretty sure there will be tears from all of us and I can already hear the boys in my mind refusing to go if it means losing their dogs. So gut wrenching. What started out as excitement is quickly going to turn into heartbreak and anger.
NoHurryCains 
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