We sold the truck to a local Toyota dealer in a pleasant transaction and got a good price. We rented an SUV so we could do the hauling we need, also to make our final trip with luggage to SeaTac airport on departure day. Then we'll leave the rental car there.
We packed up things to go into long term storage and made a trip to the storage unit. We will make one more trip to storage before we leave. Also we have been giving things to friends and donating to charity, stripping our little hotel room bare.
We bought new luggage, two each of the largest allowable standard size for the airline, so four good-sized cases altogether. We did a trial run packing up the luggage and found that we can get what we need in there, enough to get us through a couple weeks at least. Right now we are entering the narrowest part of our belongings bottleneck: we are down to the minimum, just what we can cram into our luggage and carry-ons. We will begin to build up a household again when we have arrived in Portugal, and will of course ship our storage items to our new home eventually.
We got our COVID and RSV vaccinations. There isn't a published requirement for these to enter Portugal, but it was about time for us to get them anyway and we may in fact have to show proof.
Two days ago our departure date was a week away. Gerrit had been sending notes to the Portuguese embassy every few days (the only way to contact them) for weeks, reminding them of our departure date, and receiving noncommittal and form letter replies. Now, with a week to go, they told us our new estimated date for issuing the visa was JULY 22, five weeks away! They were pushing out the 3-1/2 months they had already taken by yet another month!
We were stunned. We had almost nothing left, everything was packed, stored, or gotten rid of. How could we sit in this empty place, living out of suitcases for another month?
We tried to think of a way we could get to Portugal with our current airline tickets, so we could start living in the apartment we'd been renting since March. We wanted to get to know the neighborhood, start to buy supplies, practice our Portuguese a bit, do some touring, and avoid this double rent we'd been paying. The embassy had our passports though, so we couldn't travel. But our immigration consultant mentioned that sometimes people get a second passport in cases like this. Pat started checking into it, and it looked like that might work.
We gathered documents, had photos taken, and filled out forms yesterday, then this morning we had our appointment with the State Department downtown. All went well, and after an hour or so our expedited passports were in the queue, to be ready by Monday. ONE DAY before the plane flight!
We will probably need to return to the US to pick up our original passports and new visas when they are ready. That will have to be within the 90 days allowable on our second-passport tourist visas. There may also be a way to deliver them by courier to us in Portugal. We have probably a month to figure that out before the visas are issued.
It's now only four days before Departure Day. Four busy days of packing and last-minute prep!
(photo credit VisaNation)