Passport to the Sunshine

Let me take you back about 9 months. I lived with my wife and our three children in a perfectly ordinary semi-detached house, in a small village in Lincolnshire with a school, a couple of pubs and a corner shop. One morning, I think it was a Monday, our lives were destined to change. Dramatically change. My wife had received a letter confirming that she had been successful in her job application. And the job was just outside Lisbon in Portugal. You can imagine the emotions that were running wild within us that day as we realised that we were about to embark on a very interesting journey and that our lives would change in ways that we'd previously only dreamed about.

A sunny day in Sintra.

And now? Well, I live in a semi-detached house a few kilometres outside of Lisboa. The village has a couple of bars and a corner shop. It just happens to be a lot further south than I used to live.  The "village" is actually a suburb of Estoril, famed for it's Motor Racing Circuit and Casino.  It's situated on the coast between Sintra, Cascais and Lisboa.  The beaches are sandy and the sky is blue. The sun shines brightly and I am very happy here.

Anyway, I digress. Let's go back again to 9 months ago....

And so, we started making lists. Lots of lists. Lists of lists. And one of the most important things on those lists was to renew our passports. My wife's and our eldest boy's passports were in good order for at least a few years but our youngest lad had never had a passport so a new application was in order for him. The other two passports, namely mine and our daughter's, both had about a year or so left on them. My wife's contract at her new employer was for an initial 2 years, so that presented us with something of a problem, in that our passports would expire before we returned. So, I placed a phone call through to the passport office where I spoke to a pleasant enough lady and explained the problem. I asked whether it was necessary to renew these passports before we left or whether they could be renewed remotely from Portugal. I also explained that I would be placing a new application for my youngest so it really didn't matter if I had to do one or three applications. The response was decisive. I would be wasting a year on the two almost out-of-date passports if I renewed and she told me that renewing them from within Portugal wouldn't be a problem and that I could do it easily enough through the international office in Madrid. So that was that. We had a million other things to do before the move and so the passports were all placed in the box file ready for the move. Other jobs on the list needed doing....

We've lived here in Estoril now for a good 6 months or so. Time to renew my passport. Moreover, I'd heard that you can now do these things online, so it should be a breeze.  Or so I thought.  A quick trip on the internet revealed that the conversation with the nice lady from the passport office back in Blighty was somewhat lacking in detail.  And a very important detail too.  It would have cost me about £70 to renew my passport last year back in England. Now it's going to cost me about €160 to send the forms and documents to the office in Madrid. And there's my daughter's to renew as well, bringing the total up to over €300. If only the nice lady on the phone had mentioned that 9 months ago eh?  I suppose I could fly back over to England and get a one day service from the main office in London, but my calculator tells me it would only save me about ten pounds. Ah well. Some you lose.

Moving to a new country is fun. And exciting. But it's also a journey along a road fraught with pot holes and tricky bends.  And that's all part of the fun and excitement isn't it?