APPROVED
Getting the news that we were officially moving to Spain
July 24, 2024
I sat on the porch outside our Raleigh rental, swatting away mosquitoes and suffocating in the oppressive Southern heat.
I was waiting for the UPS driver to make his way to our house, and I watched as the driver passed through our neighborhood to another street. He couldn’t get there fast enough.
Just one day earlier, I’d received a notification from the visa application center that our passports had been dispatched back to us. That could only mean one thing: A decision had been made about our visas.
If you call BLS, the company that processed our visas for the Spanish consulate, they will tell you they can’t give you the decision over the phone and that you must wait for your passport to receive your decision. This is a nerve-wracking answer when the trajectory of your life is–quite literally–in someone else’s hands.
The answer arrived just 25 days after our appointment in Washington, D.C.
I told myself it would be fine; we had a Plan B for whatever was inside those four passports if it wasn’t the response we’d planned and hoped for.
At about 5:00 p.m., the UPS driver finally pulled up in front of our house. I stood and greeted him. He handed over that precious envelope, and then I ran inside, yelling for Will and the kids to come watch as I opened it.
I dropped the passports onto the ottoman in a scattered pile, grabbed one, and flipped through the pages as fast as I could.
There is no giant “APPROVED” stamp. You’re looking for the visa sticker on one of your passport pages. If you find it, you’ve been approved for Spanish residency and have 90 days to arrive in Spain from the date placed on the visa. That date is based on what you tell the consulate your target arrival date is. We had one-way plane tickets to Valencia for August 26, so we told them our arrival date would be August 27.
My heart raced as I flipped through those pages, but finally, I came to the one I was looking for.
The visa sticker was there, along with the first possible entry date of August 15th.
Quickly, Will and I flipped through the rest of the passports to ensure everyone was approved. We looked at one another, knowing we still had a lot to accomplish, but we’d done it. It was happening.
Game on.
As one does when one receives life-changing news, we notified our loved ones and friends that we were officially moving to Spain. Then we told Jackie, who was surprised it went so quickly, congratulated us, and gave some final advice on what to do once we landed in Valencia.
The rest of the summer flew by, but we weren’t done until we got on the plane. And getting on the plane proved to be one final adventure before we moved to Valencia.