And he's gone!

Rob has flown out to Fort Worth today for two and a half weeks. Tomorrow he meets our new landlord and landlady and will receive the keys to our rental house. They are going to show how him around the house and how things work, especially the things we're not used to, like the air-conditioning and sprinkler systems. In Texas, house foundations must be watered regularly to stop them drying out and causing subsidence, this is not a problem we've ever had living in a place called Marshfield! The rental furniture will also be delivered tomorrow and Rob will take up residence in the house, and start work on Wednesday. He's got some other tasks to complete before he comes back to Wales; buying a washing machine and tumble dryer, and trying to get at least one car organised.

Visas

Getting our US visas involved several stages:

1. Getting up to date passports.
UK children's passports last for 5 years. Two of them were expiring in June, so we renewed them back in April before our familiarisation trip to Fort Worth, whilst the other one had 2 years left on it. This wasn't OK, as the passport would expire before the visa.  Cue form filling and a trip to Newport Passport Office.

2. Photos
We needed digital 5cm square photos (not the UK standard passport photo size), white background, with the head a certain proportion, no smiling. So after snapping the photos (I discovered that children struggle with the concept of doing a "normal" face), increasing the brightness, cropping, putting them through US immigration software to make sure the head is the right size etc., you think you're finished. Wrong. Compress the files (one of them now not in enough focus, start again).  Oh and then find a website that will print this unusual size too...

3. Online visa application.
Rob did this bit, filling out the same form 5 times, one for each of us. It's a good job none of us are genocidal maniacs, terrorists, murderers, rapists, or any other sort of bad person, as this form would have winkled us out:

 

4. Interview at the US embassy in London.

Just Rob and myself had to attend an interview at the US embassy. We were applying for an L1 visa for Rob and L2 visas for the rest of us, for which Rob's company had put together a huge pack of documents, forms and supporting letter. Our appointment was at 9am, which turned out to be the same time as half of London. We join a little queue outside the Embassy to show that we had relevant documents to go in with, which then entered us into a huge queue just to go through the security checkpoint to get into the building. Our mobile phones have to go into a clear zip-lock bag and at this point I'm slightly regretting my choice of a union jack phone case. Still, after half an hour and having our bags and bodies scanned, we're in, with a number, to a huge hall with counters all down one side. After 45 minutes our number comes up and we proceed to our counter. Fingerprints are taken, forms and documents are exchanged and Rob is asked the tricky question "What are the ages of your children?" which by some miracle he got right, then we were sent to a cashier queue to stump up $500 for fraud checks. On to the second interview with a very friendly man who redid the fingerprints, asked Rob to explain his new job in the US, sent us back to the cashier counter to pay another $100 each for me and the kids (some sort of embassy fee), then we were rubber-stamped and finished. All quite straightforward in the end.

5. Collecting the passports/visas
Out of principle Rob wouldn't pay the $150 to have the passports containing our visas delivered to our house, so he collected them from a small depot in somewhere in Bridgend. It only took a week from the interview for them to be ready for collection. Here's what Rob had to say about it:
http://atexanodyssey2014.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/visas.html.

Camping in Uffington

We love camping and one of our annual family camping trips is with our gang of friends from Leicester University. As we now live scattered across Britain, it’s a great way of getting us all together in the same place. The children all get on great and joke that they are 'god-brothers' and 'god-sisters' as we are all godparents to each other's children. This year we chose a campsite in Uffington, Oxfordshire. Uffington is the site of an iron age (800 BC–AD 100) white horse carved into the hillside, exposing the chalk bedrock so that the form can be seen. It's a beautiful area of England. We had a wonderful time; playing games, flying kites, barbeques and having a good old British pub lunch. Although with a sad end for us, as it marked the first of many goodbyes.

I love these kids to bits.

The head of the Uffington White Horse.

Toasting marshmallows around the campfire.

The Severn Bridge - so often you hit rain when
you cross the bridge back into Wales!