October 5^th – Doh, again!

You may remember from my Thunderstruck entry that after finding out that we could only stay 90 days I did a hurried repack to remove some things from my luggage to lighten it up. Well it seems that I also took out my brown belt when I was removing things and I left it at home instead of repacking it. Now I have to go out and get a brown belt as I have only a black one and my hiking boots for bad weather and my second pair of city shoes are brown. Ha Ha Ha! So when we go to the department store, El Corte Ingles I’ll be looking for a belt too. I want to see if I can get a 110v transformer since I fried the other one and also we want to look at booking travel back to the U.K. for our return in January if our attempt to get a longer term visa fails.

Update: We went to the US embassy today and talked with a consular employee and his basic message was that they had many queries about the same question but they had never received any information as to whether anyone was able to get an extension. However another employee said that it didn’t make much sense because one would think that with all the financial trouble over here they Spanish govt. would be open to tourists spending longer periods and more money here, but the bureaucracy didn’t seem to care. We took that to mean that there was almost no chance for us. So at this point were resigned to returning to the U.S. in January. We stopped at a travel agency to see about tickets to London and it turns out that it will be least expensive to fly to London with a roundtrip ticket but only use one side of it. That figures!