It may not look like much to you....

You may look at this and think "what a lot of ground beef".

I look at it and think "wow, that took a lot of planning, several days and the risk of a cancelled visa, a possible 2 hour detour to avoid the cancelled visa, a cooler full of ice and big bag of snack food to keep Layla happy in the event of any of the above coming to pass.

We've mentioned that the border was going to be an issue before we landed. We were aware of that. Tom had two weeks of crossing with no issues, I've had two dr appointments with only the hassles of waiting in an over-crowded facility....but no visa issues until Friday when we were forced to check out.

So on Saturday we decided to drive to the border on OUR side of town (25 mins away... our town is essentially in no man's land because you can live here without a visa, sort of....) and then on to the next town to see our dear friends J and V.
Getting everything together and in the car was one thing. Crossing the border was a whole other issue. We got there about 7pm and found out that there is now a $35 penalty per person per day for not getting a new stamp in your passport after the stamp from the previous country is cancelled. They are effectively trying to stop people from staying in town with no visa from either country. This'll do it in my book.

So $100 and one hour later, we are on our way. We're still not sure what took an hour. There were only about 3 other people in the entire building. It is a lovely building, by the way. I convinced Lj to run around it in circles (it is actually a circular shape on the inside). I loaned my pen to two sets of people filling out paperwork. They'll give you all the paperwork in the world but not a single pen.

Once we were in the car again about to pull out, Lj says she has to pee. Sigh. I have tried to keep her in panties since she really is potty trained, but with all the transitions and crazy schedules and automatic flushing toilets (terrible invention for the toilet-training set), she is better off in diapers.

Anyway - once in the car, we decided to stay TWO night with J and V so we could avoid the possible penalty on the other end of not zooming right through town all in one day.

We decided to zoom through town today for my doctors appointment. We were really praying that after the appointment we could get back into town without our visa being cancelled, then having to drive through town (again in one day!) to the other border so we could have at least one valid visit visa.

Sigh. Just writing this makes me tired. I'm going to finish later (=