Day 18: Passports!

We woke up for the day of our flight, still no passports in our hands. The tracking showed that my passport has left Ellicott City’s post office, and Julia’s passport has left the post office in Baltimore.

Julia drove to her sister’s house in Baltimore to wait for hers, while I stayed in her parents’ house waiting for mine.

Express mail is guaranteed to arrive by noon. At half past twelve I was already engaged in a pointless conversation with the post office (me: “where is the envelope that I was supposed to get by noon?!”. Lady: “sir, we just got it today!”).

I called Julia, to see how she was doing, and as we were both sighing on both sides of the line, she started yelling “somebody just knocked on the door!”. A minute later she called me and reported live the opening of the envelope and the revealing of the visa page in the passport.

She came back to her parents’ house and we had lunch with her parents who were working from home in order to take us to the airport, but it was already two o’clock, and my passport’s location was still a mystery. In an act that I interpret as “I can handle my daughter leaving, but not leaving her terrible boyfriend in my house”, Julia’s mother called the post office and started yelling at them. Turns out that the envelope was left in their mail box. Julia and I ran outside and obtained my passport. Let me say this one last time: we had the two passports six and a half hours before we were moving to another continent.

So I’m writing this from the airport in Washington DC, and we fly in one hour. We stop in Iceland for an 18 hours layover. The plan is to rent a car and drive a little bit, and then continue to France. We can’t believe we made it. Really, we can’t.

There are, however, two more days of adventures until we finally settle down in our new home in Paris. Stay tuned.

I will leave you with something to think about – take a look at the sign for the chapel house in the airport. Is it just me, or does this sign portrays a child preparing to give a blow-job?