and then we are done

So we were supposed to.... Leave on a three week trip to New Orleans, Miami, and Sarasota. To spend time in the warm weather before we headed back to Chicago and packed to leave for Spain. Well, best laid plans and all that... I am fairly certain "God" just laughs at stuff like this because of course we went to the appointment at the consulate and didn't have the paperwork we needed from our own Department of State (eight weeks+and counting - we were told 5-6 weeks). 

So we tossed all the cards in the air and watched where they fell. We had a grace period from the Consulate of ten days to get the missing piece (the full dossier was literally dozens of papers for each of us). A week of sleepless nights and a request to our congressman got us to the final submission. Now we wait. They have our passports so we can't leave the country.

But these days I think it's dinner time at 4:30 because it's so dark. Have to get away while we wait. So, soon we are off for a "reverse order" trip (as the only things that couldn't simply be rebooked were the Sarasota segment arrangements during the week before Thanksgiving.)

Honestly we need a vacation so the sitting and waiting doesn't drive us crazy. And lord knows we can't just stay home.  So in prep for our long delayed trip (three times canceled from COVID and immediately post COVID) to N.O.La. I have given you a few photos from a couple of prior trips. 

To my mind there are only a few places you can go on the mainland  US and feel like you are in a foreign country. New Orleans is one of them. 

So after much tsoris regarding the Apostille needed for our NLV application we are finally done... the applications were submitted this morning at the Spanish Consulate! Now in 5-6 weeks we should be in possession of the visas and on our way to Spain.

As a result of all the delays we have now canceled our original reservations and re-booked for an apartment nearer to where we stayed last year- on the edge of the "walking city" and old town.... 

So we now will be using the same Chinese store we did last year- 

and be around the corner from the same park we used for outdoor hours in the spring - the one that had art shows and sales on Sundays- and an excellent gelateria along the east side :-)

 

not far from the Setas and close to Corte Ingles where Phil already knows the grocery store and also close to an Aldi across the Parque del Duque from the Corte, so a comfortable place to stay - and continue our explorations of Sevilla.

Meanwhile, because our friends knew we were stressed by the apostille issue and we had canceled our plans for NOLa and Miami they had us for dinner at their place and ordered in all kinds of goodies from NOLa restaurants! Here is the menu for the dinner:

Dinner with our favorite supermodel Honeysuckle Arkebauer, a fabulous gift from friends who knew we were feeling down about our travel plans being disrupted by the visa application. So they snapped into action and had us over for the New Orleans dinner we would have been eating tonight. The menu is included but we had a number of NOLa favorites!

By the time dessert came the pup was pooped. So she skipped the lovely cake (saving her supermodel figure) and took a nap in the hall.

so now we are getting ready to go to Sarasota then Miami and then New Orleans (the reverse order of our originally planned trip). When we get back we hope we are close to having the NLV and our passports ready for travel to Spain as ex-pats!