Last months, the family and I embarked in a 2 1/2 weeks long trip to Europe, our old home, to mainly renew our visas and spend some time with our family as close as possible to Christmas. We are now back in Burbank, SoCal and are legit for another 3 years at least but boy, was this trip a roller coaster! We’ve been back for 2 weeks and we are still recovering from both physical and emotional fatigue incurred during the trip.
I’ll try to share some of the highlights here over the next couple of weeks and will share how anything that could have gone wrong actually did go wrong…
Part 1 - November 22 – 8:00AM
It is Sunday morning, the sun is shinning and I am checking for the 100th time that our stack of paperwork for our visa interview in London is in order and that I have all documents together in one large bag. Last read of the check list provided by our immigration attorney from Disney and I realize that our passports all have to be valid for at least the duration of the visa. Quick check on mine. I’m good. Sarah. She’s good. Thia: Arg… Kids can only get passports that last for 5 years and she is now 4 1/2… Her French passport will expire sometime next year which means that she will be unable to have a visa embossed into it. Quick check on the British one. Same! This is a major roadblock and at that point, I even fear that we might have to cancel our whole trip!
One of the major issue for us for this trip is that following what we will call a misunderstanding between parties, Disney decided to not provide for the renewal of either Sarah or Alethia’s visa and we had to book them on airmiles which usually result in non-transferrable, non-exchangeable tickets. This fact could just have meant totally rebooking flights for the girls, rebooking visa interviews at the US Embassy, meaning potentially hitting the Xmas shutdown period and even worse, potentially ending up out of status (means illegal… not fun!).
An initial call to the French consulate resulted in a “Sorry Sir, zis iz no emergency, pleeze contact us tomorrow from 9:00am to 5:00pm”. Yup, none of us were either stuck in jail or victim of a natural disaster, I get it, but all I wanted was to know how fast I could get a new passport for Thia.
Sarah however remembered that somewhere in the UK system, there existed a way to get a passport renewed within a week, a day or even several hours. To good to be true! Sarah finds the phone number of the UK Passport office and we call them. After an hour of talking to both the passport office, Sarah’s mum and changing plans, we have an interview booked for next Friday (Nov 27th) in the Durham passport office at 11:00am which means that we should be good for our Monday morning visa interview in London. Only issue… we need to get some pictures of Thia certified by a lawyer as well as parts of the visa application form, as Thia will not be able to attend in person. And if anything would go wrong, we still had the Saturday to find another plan B (We had so many plans B during this whole trip).
Life can now resume. Things are a bit more complicated than planned but we still hope that everything we go smoothly and same as when we moved from London to Los Angeles, we might cut things awfully fine but we shall be OK in the end. We can now go back to our day and continue packing…


















