March 25 late afternoon we both received an e-mail from the Portuguese consulate informing us that our visa application was approved and authorized. Tomorrow morning I will take the train in to the city and hand-deliver our passports to the VFS office! Typically it takes 4 working days to put the visa sticker in the passport. We have learned to not count on the timing -- don't hold your breath. After all, we applied for the visa last December 4th, and other later applicants already got their visas! And I had purchased a cheaper round-trip ticket, expecting to return to Porto on the 24th of March. When the visa notification still had not arrived by last Friday, I worried about changing the ticket: what date would I change it to? We cannot be sure when the notification will arrive, and when we will get our passports back. Fortunately, they can suspend the itinerary for successive five-day periods. What a relief! Now we truly will not schedule our flight back until we have
Log of our travels and thoughts.