We are ‘Go’…

Well, there is good news. We have our visas and are traveling to Spain in 10 days or so…

As regular readers know, we have had some frustrations with trying to anticipate the bureaucratic wranglings of the Spanish Consulate in Boston, and the Ministry of Immigration in Madrid. Communication is sparse at best, and emails tend not to be answered.

We submitted our papers and documentation on 1st December, and at that time it was suggested that we may have our visas by mid January. Note the words ‘suggested’ and ‘may’, which to my mind, are not the words of someone relying on a robust process and an element of certainty. Needless to say, I was checking the website we were given for progress, and for weeks it just said ‘In Progress’, but with no detail about what progress had — or had not — been made.

Anyway, I decided last weekend that on the Monday I would email the Consulate in Boston. I fired off a very polite email before 9.00am, using words like ‘respectfully’, and ‘is there any chance’, with a view to trying to get some idea as to how much longer we might be waiting, and whether we would have to change our flights… again… I then got in the car to drive to Downtown Boston for a doctor’s appointment.

So, imagine my surprise when the ‘phone rang in the car, and it was my partner Mary, informing me that the Consulate had been on the ‘phone to her. This in itself was surprising, as it was the first telephone contact that we had received from the Consulate, even though I had made many attempts to ‘phone them months ago, and had constantly been re-routed to a ‘full’ voice mailbox. I was however in for a bigger surprise. The visas were agreed, and we had an appointment to collect them from the Consulate at 11.00am in the morning the next day. I was so enthused by this that I nearly crashed the car on Memorial Drive in Cambridge…

Interestingly, my first thought was: “this can’t be happening.” After the waiting, the frustrations, and the uncertainty, having visas ‘dropped into our laps’ at a day’s notice seemed too good to be true. I even said to myself that: “I won’t believe this until I have the visa in my passport, in my hand.” We now have the visas in our passports, flights booked, and we are trying to do all the ‘last minute’ stuff before we start our new life in Estepona, Spain.

Just as an aside, the website still says ‘In Progress’ this morning.

I think that the moral of this is that things do come to those who wait, and to all of the other people waiting on Consulates all over the world, you will get there eventually. The frustrations are significant, but there is stuff going on with your applications, and Spain does want you, provided of course that you meet their criteria.

I expect my next post to be from sunny Spain, where the temperature was 70 degrees F (21 C) yesterday — in Boston it was 20 degrees F (-6 C).

It is getting so close now that we can taste it…