We’ve been quiet for the last few weeks because we have been stressed beyond belief. It has been the most stressful period surrounding this move and the worst part? It was stress of our own making. Now that the issue has been resolved, we can breath. And explain.

First, some SUPER simple procedural and background information. I promise this will be quick.

In order to get a residency visa, which is the document that allows you to remain in Portugal for longer than 90 days (the time that is allowed under a tourist visa), you need to submit an application, in person, at a VFS office. VFS offices are assigned based on your home address so we had to fly to DC, our assigned location, to complete our appointment. Once you submit your application, you have to wait anywhere from 30 days – forever (ok, usually no more than 120 days) to learn whether or not you were approved for the visa. If you are approved, you then send your passports to the Portuguese Embassy in DC, they put the actual paper visa into your passport and return them, and you fly to Portugal and enter the country on this residency visa. Once here, you have another interview with the SEF to continue the process. These appointments are incredibly hard to get but are essential for you to remain in this country for the long-term. That’s the ELI5 version and frankly, all I really understand about the process.

Originally, our appointments at the VFS office were scheduled for late May. We hoped that would provide us enough time to get the visas approved, get the visas in hand, and move to Lisbon prior to the girls starting school. We hit a little snag in May that required us to push our VFS appointments to late July (that had been the most stressful part of this move until this incident. And anyone who spoke with us during that time knew how stressed we were – just imagine it ten-fold). Now, from my aforementioned timeline, you can see that an appointment in late July would not render us our residency visas in time. That meant that we would need to come to Portugal on a tourist visa, make sure not to stay more than 90 days, and deal with the residency visa once it was (hopefully) approved.

We arrived in the middle of August and got the girls settled into school. In the middle of September, we got the notification that our visas had been approved (yay!!). For reasons I don’t understand, the visas had to be mailed to the embassy from within the U.S., meaning we had two options: mail them to my dad to coordinate the shipment to the Portuguese Embassy and then back to us in Lisbon OR have one (or more) of us fly back over to the U.S. and do it ourselves.

I am a bit embarrassed to write about this next part. We consider ourselves relatively intelligent people while being firm believers in Murphy’s Law. And we have traveled quite a bit so we understand some of the nuances that international travel can introduce. But for reasons we still question, we chose the former option – we chose to send our passports to my dad to facilitate their mailing to DC. We’re still not sure why. Maybe it was due to laziness? I mean, it is a minimum of two 7 hours flights there and back. Maybe we just felt that we were in the middle of settling in and didn’t want to disrupt that? Perhaps it would have been too complicated for more than one of us to return but no one wanted to go alone? Who knows.

Y’all…OUR PASSPORTS GOT STUCK IN U.S. CUSTOMS.

WTH? Here are our only offical and accepted indentity documents and they were stuck in Atlanta. There isn’t really a great way to contact U.S. Customs and once something gets stuck in there, there isn’t a way to find out its status. DHL told us that the item had been seized (??) and our relocation specialist, who was working on this with us, had managed to speak with someone who just said that Customs was backed up a couple of weeks. Our passports were in a small envelope with no monetary value and they were NOT on the list of items that couldn’t be shipped into the U.S. Even my dad, with his years and years of international shipping expertise, was befuddled. How does business get done if random documents get stuck?

We were making contingency plans and truthfully, learned a lot of information that could be helpful in the future should, god forbid, we need it. You can get emergency passports through the U.S. Consulate here in Lisbon. These passports are good for three months and will allow you to travel throughout most of the world (interestingly, France will not let you enter on a emergency passport). Sadly, an emergency visa wouldn’t have helped us too much as we needed a full passport to get our visa and we know that the wait times to get a passport are long. We also learned that with enough time, you can get a full passport from the U.S. Consulate, but given that we were bumping up against our 90 day tourist visa deadline, we didn’t have enough time to pursue that option.

We started thinking about how we would manage the girls’ school, assuming we could get an emergency passport to return to the U.S. and apply for our new passports. The school here doesn’t allow for remote learning, which is fine although slightly unexpected given that it is an international school. So we were plotting on how we might enroll the girls in a school back in Chicago while we waited on our new passports to be processed – literally the last thing we wanted to do because we didn’t want to cause them more chaos. We also counted the days we had left on our tourist visa. Could we leave and come back on the emergency passport while someone stayed behind in Chicago to wait for our passports? Possibly. But that solution had its own issues. There was no stressless solution.

We resorted to emailing our representatives. Very important information: while both Senator Tammy Duckworth and Rep. Mike Quigley responded to our request for help, Senator Duckworth’s office was FAR more responsive and provided better answers. File that away in the “Information that is nice to have but that I hope I never have to use again” file.

I mentioned at the beginning that this issue has been resolved. Otherwise, I would still be in the corner plotting our end game. After two weeks, the passports were released to my dad who was able to send them to the embassy and then back to us. We haven’t missed our SEF appointments and, fingers crossed, everything is back on track. But this is absolutely an example as do what we say, not as we do. DO NOT MAIL PASSPORTS! We didn’t have any travel plans for this weekend but now that we are once again free to move about the country (meaning we have our passports to use to check into a hotel), we might just find some place to go.