Russia - Here We Come

After 72 hours of sheer pandemonium, a truck load of stress, limited amounts of sleep, a few bottles of wine, our car failing the required safety inspection and a special waiver being granted by the Consular General from the Russian Federation Consulte in Sydney, we boarded a plane out of Alice Springs on our way to Perm, Russia.

The call we’d been waiting on for months finally came at midnight on Tuesday the 14th of December and our adoption agency caseworker informed us that we’d been granted a court date – for December 24th AND that we need to visit Dennis the day before we went to court. Looking at the calendar, one might say – ten days – no problem. This is when reality reaches up and takes a big hunk out of your hiney and makes you say “Holy Macaroni Batman - We had better get busy!”.

Not much sleep occurred at our house the night we got the call. We started making lists as soon as we hung up the phone and deciding who was responsible for which tasks. Dave got travel and lodging and I got visas, packing and alot of little but important stuff. It would less then truthful to say that there weren’t a few cross words exchanged in that 72 hour period, but no blood was shed. I won’t bore you with all the minutia, just a few of the highlights.

We received our car registration renewal notice on Monday the 13th. The registration expires before we’d get back, so I popped by the Motor Vehicle Registry on Wednesday only to be informed that it didn’t pass the inspection. None of the items sited were actually safety related, but you don’t get to argue with the guy holding the clip board (they failed me because my high beams were aimed too high, plus a couple of other piddly items). RESOLUTION – A good friend of ours is a mutual friend and next door neighbor with our mechanic. We left the car at their house with the failed inspection notice, car registration and a credit card. They’ll work it out with the mechanic and handle it while we’re gone.

We needed one last document notarized and when I called for an appointment at the only notary office in Alice Springs I was informed that both of the notaries were on holiday and wouldn’t be back until after the first of the year. RESOLUTION – Dave hopped online and found a notary in Sydney that would schedule an appointment for Monday morning.

A Russian visa takes two business days to be issued (if you have all the correct paperwork). Those days don’t include the day the consulate receives your passports or the day you pick it up. We didn’t get the required documentation required to submit the applications until Wednesday. Our passports were sent to Sydney via courier on Thursday, with hopes that they would be ready to be picked up on Tuesday morning and we could fly out that afternoon. We ran into trouble getting our Russian entry visas and the only way we were able to leave for Russia on time was that a visa department worker and the Consular General at the Sydney Consulate of the Russian Federation reviewed our case, took pity on us and stamped the essential visa in our passports without some of the required documentation. We had tickets booked to fly out of Alice on Sunday the 19th and we didn’t know if we’d get Russian entry visas until noon on Friday. This resulted in a few buckets full of stress and the consumption of more than one mango rum popsicles by Dennis’ new mommy. RESOLUTION – Nothing but good ole fashioned sweet talk and a big dose of good luck.

We also found out during this time that the US Immigrations Service seems to have misplaced the fingerprints that they required us to have made in October, because our previous prints had “expired”.
RESOLUTION – I sent them a copy of the signed delivery notice from the courier service. The email I sent was fairly polite - all considering. They admitted blame and are checking on it. We asked our adoption agency caseworker to bulldog immigrations for us on this one while we were in the air.

The actual travel from Alice Springs to Perm take over 30 hours and is a leisurely affair.  Our tickets took us first to Sydney for two nights so we could pick up our passports and visas and get the other document notarized.  From there we flew to Hong Kong then Helisinki and on to Moscow before heading to Perm.

We also had to mow the lawn, find someone to water plants and pick up mail, whip up some laundry, find two people to sub for us on the bowling league, cleanout the fridge, and everything else that’s required when you’re going to be gone from home for a month.  I hope we didn't forget anything important....