Boondock Puffins

After getting to France, we discovered that we needed to go back to the UK to sort our visas. We had our work permits through but needed to apply at the French Consulate in London.

As a top tip for anyone applying for a French work visa: there is a blip in the France Visas website at the moment that means if you choose you language as English in your settings, the option to apply for a Long Stay work visa disappears from your drop down box on the online application. You need to set your language as French and then can use Google’s translate function to work it out if needed.

The journey back across France in 2 days was relatively smooth. As I’ve said before, the BipnGo was revolutionary!

Back in the UK, we made it to the consulate only to find that, despite saying on all information that we only needed 3 months on our passports, they actually meant 3 months after the length of your visa was up (which clearly you should imply for yourself with no clues!). Of course, Tom had 9 months which was not enough… off to Birmingham we go for an emergency passport application.

Passport application handed in, visas finally applied for, we had nothing to do but to play the waiting game. They advice it takes usually 10-15 working days, but can take longer or shorter.

Fortuitously, this coincided with the visit of Tom’s brother and his girlfriend from Australia – the first time we’d seen him in 3 years. An awesome few days were has exploring in and around Oxford with them around our work times.

Beyond this, we got to hang out with our dog again for a month, and catch up with family and a few friends.

We also managed to say goodbye to Buntu the bike for the winter, and to say a forever farewell to the trusty yellow Panda Dougal. This was balanced out by the new addition to our family of Captain Bigfoot – a French reg Skoda Yeti. Automatic and 4×4, he is a lean mean driving machine and pretty ideal for the mountains.

So what did we learn from this unexpected trip? This consolidated in our minds that visas are a right faff, the French love their paperwork, but that maybe everything does indeed happen for a reason – we got to spend some valuable time with people who mean a lot to us for much longer than we had anticipated – all’s well that end’s well right?