Travel Visas!

Everything started telescoping pretty quickly last week. I got my travel visa to Saudi Arabia, a very big hurdle cleared. The movers showed up last Friday and packed all of the things I decided I could just not live without. It took them all of three hours! All but one large box of items will be sent by boat and will show up about 3 months after I do. I chose the things for the E box, sent by plane and arriving a couple of weeks after me, very carefully: my Mac, some dog bedding, some key technical books, that sort of thing.

A few days earlier, I finished packing the suitcases that will fly with me--all FIVE of them. One contains a bag of dog food. All of them are overweight. But paying those extra bag and overweight bag fees will still be cheaper than shipping those items. And it ensures that I'll have plenty of clothes, meds, and other key items right away.

The biggest hurdle cleared last week was the final approval of the dogs' travel documents. This one sentence sounds so simple but the process was, well, simply insane. Timing was horribly tight. None of the docs can be more than 30 days old but as you continue to read, the series of steps required could easily take longer than that if there was any sort of snafu along the way.

I first had to get new rabies shots for both dogs. They weren't due but they had to have those shots within six months of their travel to KSA. Then I had to get a letter from my vet, addressed to Customs in KSA, stating each dog was either a watch dog, hunting dog, or seeing eye dog (Harry and Mimi are now officially watch dogs). Then those got sent to US Department of Agriculture along with Form 7001, the standard export form for dogs. I sent those docs FedEx with a prepaid return FedEx envelope enclosed.

When those came back in just a couple of days with a fancy USDA seal on Form 7001 and the vet letter, I then had to get authentication from the Texas Secretary of State. But this fine office cannot authenticate federal documents, which is what Form 7001 is (federal trumps state in this case). So I had to make copies of each set of docs, attach a short letter stating those were copies of the originals (included in the same package), have that letter notarized, then send all of that to the Texas Secretary of State. But when I called, I found out that that fine office would take up to 10 business days to authenticate then return them. So I bought a round-trip ticket on Southwest from Dallas to Austin for the next day, called the pet sitter to let the pups out a couple of times, and flew to Austin, borrowed a friend's car, drove downtown, and had the materials (really, just the notarized letter) authenticated in about 10 minutes. This produced a new page with a shiny gold seal attached to each set of documents, now numbering 8 pages for each dog.

The next step was to send everything to Washington to the US Department of State for authentication by the US Secretary of State. Yes, that would be Secretary Hillary Clinton. They told me they would keep the documents for five days. I FedEx'ed everything to them along with yet another prepaid return FedEx envelope. Annoyingly, the Columbus Day holiday fell in the middle of this but at last the documents showed up with a super duper fancy page added to each set. Gold seal, embossed stamp, Clinton's signature, the whole shooting match. All that for only $8 per set!

Whew! The last step was to send everything to the Saudi Consulate in Houston for final approval. I sent everything by FedEx with yet another prepaid return FedEx envelope.

After sending those off, I slipped back into major stress mode. What if I had failed to jump through all of the necessary hoops? What if I didn't do things in the right order or had made a mistake in the documents? What would I do if the Saudis didn't approve the documents?

But good news at last--there is a spiffy stamp (like a postage stamp) and some Arabic text along with an official looking signature.

The biggest hurdle of all is yet to come. That is of course actually making the trip itself. But more on that later!