Monday evening we heard that PLAN has the Travel Approval for us and is requesting a consulate date of April 5th, so we'd travel about 10 days before that. (March 26? Yikes!) Pauquette says the actual date is usually about 5 days later than the requested one, so that'd put us back on the original timeline of traveling April 1. Still, it's getting awfully close.
With that soft news (or hard rumor), we decided the visa applications we were about to send that evening should go in for 48-hour processing instead of the usual 5-day turnaround. It'd been a long time since I raced to the FedEx office at the airport, but the traffic and parking winds were in my favor. Made it there a whole 10 minutes before the last pickup, and the counter person was very nice in helping me make sure all the airbills-within-airbills were correct.
This morning, we heard from the visa courier service (There's Always Hope) that she submitted our applications Tuesday. We should be looking at Chinese characters in our passports by Saturday.
