Consulate hassles drag on

On Tuesday, January 10th, we went to the Consulate in Houston.  Since we are living 30 minutes past Helotes, we had to get up extra early to get to San Antonio, navigate through the rush hour traffic IN San Antonio, and then get out on the other side of San Antonio in good time to get us to Houston by 11am, which is when we had an appointment.  It was a good weather day so the drive was nice and easy.
We found the consulate, kind of remembering where it was from the last time we were there, and went in all hopeful.  The lady took our passports and we sat down to wait.  She came back a few minutes later saying there was a little problem.  Of course.  Well, she said that Guillermo's passport didn't have any blank page left on which to place his visa so they couldn't give him his.  We had kind of worried about this, but there was one blank page at the end and we figured the visa could be put on that page.  Well, the lady wouldn't budge, said it was against the law to place anything on that last page and that we should go get more pages added.  Yeah, like it was that easy.  Here we had driven 250 miles and now it was seeming like it was for nothing.  They said I had enough blank pages for my visa to be placed, by the way.

Guillermo was just stunned and frustrated.  We left the consulate and decided to call the passport office and they wouldn't even talk to us and said we couldn't come in unless we had an appointment.  The passport office did tell Guillermo that it was up to the issuing country whether to place something on that last page or not, but that there was no law against it.  So, we went BACK up to the consulate and told the lady that, but she just wouldn't do it.  She claimed she even checked with her supervisor, who also said they won't do it.  We left the consulate 2 hours after arriving, still in shock and wondering what we were going to do.  We did get her to put MY visa in my passport, at least, before leaving.

So, we drove back home.  We were coming to the decision that we needed to get to a post office as soon as possible and look into the possibility of either getting new pages added to Guillermo's passport or just getting a whole brand new one.

So, the next day, Guillermo goes to the Leon Valley post office and talks with a nice guy there who helped him figure out his options.  The end result was that on Thursday, Guillermo filled out forms to renew his passport, got some new passport photos taken, paid for the renewal and a fee to get the passport expedited, and now we wait for this new passport to arrive!