Visas and Passports--Holy Cow!

Before I can go to Peru for a year and a half I need a passport and a visa.  Sounds easy, right?  Wrong!  My mom and I have learned the hard way that when it comes to traveling outside the country, nothing is easy.

The first thing I had to do was to get a passport since I hadn't traveled outside of the U.S. before (besides kayaking to Canada, but that doesn't count).  We went to Walmart to have my photo taken.  They only have one person working at Walmart who knows how to take passport photos, and she was gone, so we tried to have them done at Walgreens--the only other place in Duncan, Oklahoma that does passport photos.  Their printer was broken, so we ended up having to wait until the next day.  No big deal.

The next day we went back to Walmart to have my pictures taken.  Success! Then we took all the other documents we needed (or so we thought) to the courthouse to submit them and apply for my passport.  It turns out that since I have a Utah driver's license instead of an Oklahoma license, they wouldn't accept my license as photo ID--I'm not sure why that makes it invalid, but whatever floats their goat.  I had to go home and get my BYU ID to prove my identity, and come back.  When they were satisfied that I'm not an impostor, they looked over my paperwork.  I was missing a couple things, so we left, got everything else, and came back.  Finally everything was ready to submit.  A couple weeks later my passport came.

Once I got my passport I had to apply for my visa.  I needed to submit some paperwork to my secretary of state to get apostilles for my power of attorney and passport before I could send everything to Salt Lake.  I sent everything to my state, just like I was told to do, but it came back saying that my power of attorney had to have a translation in English--the power of attorney I was given was in Spanish.  So I did my best to translate it (with a lot of help from the Internet) and sent it back.  I finally got my apostilles and sent them to Salt Lake. Hallelujah!  Now hopefully my visa is processed in enough time for me to go straight to Peru!