It's been a while since I've posted about the CRP and with only 40-odd days to go, I thought I'd give an update of what's been going on.
Our Visa petition finally arrived from Disney a couple of weeks ago, which I initially thought meant we'd be at the Embassy in London a couple of weeks later and passport and visa in hand well before our departure date. Unfortunately, for us, it hasn't been that straight forward!
Once you receive your petition notice, you can complete the DS-160 form needed for your visa, upload your photo, and theoretically book your appointment at your nearest embassy or consulate. Everything was working perfectly until we read about the problems US embassies were having with printing and processing visas. There was a massive hardware failure with their systems, meaning that applications couldn't be processed nor visas issued. We were able to complete the online form but when it came to booking appointments, the earliest we could get was the 28th July. Visas take 5-7 days to be returned to you (providing there is no problems) and as we leave on August 9th, this seemed to be cutting it extremely fine to me! Lots of other people from our arrival group decided to book appointments for the Belfast consulate as they are able to get there quite easily and appointments were showing as mid-July. For us to get to Belfast from East Anglia requires a lot of travel planning and money, which is something that I just couldn't afford at the time. There was also the issue that if you have a problem with the visa, the embassy or consulate you first applied for is the only one who can help you. After a lot of consideration and stress, we decided to bank on the London embassy and the later date, praying that all the problems would be sorted.
At the moment, it seems that the problem has been resolved in the London embassy but they have a huge backlog to clear. On the plus side, we have managed to rearrange our visa appointments (four times so far) to a much earlier date - we are now going mid-July instead of at the end of the month - which gives us much more time to play with and has allowed me to relax about that aspect of the visa process.
Our appointment is at 8am which means we'll have to leave at around 4am (not pleased) but hopefully it'll all be sorted on the day and our passports will be lovingly couriered back to us quickly. I'm keeping everything crossed, so watch this space!
The only other "big" thing we need to sort is our medical insurance. We are swaying towards taking out a policy for the first four months and then switching to Disney's insurance when we are out there. I'll write a post on that when we get that sorted out.
Once the visa and insurance is done, it'll be time to think about packing and shopping (although I've already bought my Disney VANs and a new swimsuit ready for Florida ... eee!) and to start thinking about more admin-y things like International Drivings Licence etc. I have three weeks left at work, the school term will be over, and we won't have very long left at all. Exciting times ahead!
I'm also thinking about putting a Disney blog link page together - so if you have your own CRP blog or know of some others, comment/tweet/email me the links!
