Which means, naturally, that we’re not there yet. There’s a bit of good news, though. Reportedly, our visas have been approved in Brazil now, which means approval has to find its way back to San Francisco. This could happen as soon as today, or as late as never. Probably somewhere in the middle, though.

We’ll keep you updated as soon as we hear anything concrete. Of course, we’ve learned by this point that nothing is concrete except actually having the visas in our hands, which is why we haven’t posted for two weeks.

In other news, I spent this weekend in the woods, hiking on my father-in-law’s annual fishing trip to Mount Rainier. You can view the inevitable hikecast, and amuse yourself at the expense of my miserable fishing skills. Also, I uploaded another hikecast from last month that I kept forgetting about, in which my brother and I hiked along the Pacific Crest Trail a bit.

Please do keep praying that the visas come soon.

So, we’re not actually in Rio right now. Actually, we’re in Crescent City, California. Which has very little in common with Rio, aside from the existence of a beach. Why are we here? It’s a long story that I will put to you in truncated form.

Two nights before we were planning to leave, we got a message from our visa service that the consulate still needed a mess of documents, and that it was going to take until mid-September to get our visas–the ones we had been expecting in the mail on Thursday. After some panicked phone calls between here and Brazil, we decided that the best thing to do was to drive overnight down to San Francisco and see if we could sort out things out ourselves, and hopefully leave on Tuesday or so.

That didn’t really happen either. After some baffling conversations with the consulate, we eventually figured out that there had been some kind of miscommunication, and what we were told was going to happen was not what was going to happen. That’s why the consulate people were looking at us like we were crazy.

The good news is that we finally know what is going on and what the plan is. This week, all our documents will be mailed to Brazil, and once there, Brazil will be emailing confirmation back to the consulate, who can issue our visas at that time. Hopefully all this happens before the end of the week, but we’ll see how things go. Until then, it’s back to twiddling our thumbs in Washington.

But first, a drive along the Pacific coast–hence, Crescent City.

Word is that our visas have been approved, the visa service should be picking them up from the consulate tomorrow, we should have them in hand on Thursday and we fly out on Friday! Praise God!

That’s not entirely true–we’re staying with Lorraine’s parents. But we are indeed all packed up. It took until midnight last night, but we’ve moved out of our townhouse and are completely ready to fly to Brazil. Except that they won’t let us into the county, of course. Still no word on that part of things.