Consulate letter!!!!

We have our Consulate letter!!  Our dossier is now officially complete!   I shipped it via Fedex to Gladney this morning, so there is nothing left for us to do but wait.  We expect everything to be in Honduras next week!

I want to share our experience in hopes this might help someone else, especially since we were the first Gladney family and as far as I know, the only one in the adoption process who has been to the New York Consulate.  I know I enjoyed reading the details of other family experiences.

We live in Maine, which is about 6-7 hours from New York City so it's not exactly close so it required some planning and help from our parents.  Thank goodness for them!!

My mother-in-law, Andrea said that she'd stay overnight on Monday and take care of Evan so that we could start the drive once Dave got out of work, so she got to our house and we left at 5:30PM.  My mom took over for Andrea on Tuesday morning and took him to daycare/preschool for the morning. Our plan was to drive as far as we could towards New Haven, CT Monday night and take the train into NYC on Tuesday morning. We managed to get all the way there and checked into the Omni Hotel at Yale around 9:30PM.

We decided to take Amtrak from New Haven into Penn Station and that was scheduled to leave at 7:38AM and arrive in NYC at 9:20.  Well, we were delayed 40 minutes because the engine in our train had to be changed, and then the replacement didn't work so finally after 3 engines, we were on our way!  We arrived at Penn Station a little after 10:00.   As we were waiting for the train to get a working engine, all I could think was that we were wasting precious time and hoping that this was not a sign of things to come at the Consulate.  We only had this one day to get the letter because Dave had to work the next day in Maine.  Our agency said that they've heard of families waiting anywhere from 1-5 hours to get their letter at various other Consulates.  Since we were the first family in New York we had no idea what to expect!  The Consulate is very close to Penn Station, maybe a 10 minute walk, if that, so I recommend to anyone needing to go to the NYC Consulate to take a train into there.  Because we had no idea what to expect, we stopped at a store on the way to the Consulate to stock up on snacks in case we had a very long wait.  We arrived at the Consulate at 10:30AM.  I had planned to be at the Consulate earlier because we had no idea what to expect when we walked in there so I wanted to get there as early as possible. 

The entrance to the Consulate is marked with the Consulate seal on the window, and a Honduran flag awning over the door.  Once inside, we were greeted and we told him what we were there for.  He gave us a number (5) and had us take a seat in the waiting area.  It had several short rows of blue chairs, a large Honduran flag on the wall and a large flat-screen TV that played what seemed to be vacation spots in Honduras.

We waited for half an hour until our number was called.  We were brought out back and up the stairs and into a small office.  The gentleman was very nice and said that he was familiar with the letter so that was a huge relief!  We gave him our dossier and he asked if everything had been "legalized" and gave our paperwork a quick look.  He used our passports to type our names into the letter, printed it out, stamped and signed it and the letter was done!  It took all of 10 minutes!  I did ask for two letters, in case something happened to one of them I wanted a back-up.  He charged us $20 and requested it in cash.

After leaving the Consulate, we walked around Times Square which was fun.  I got my picture taken with a random Mickey Mouse character walking around, which was dressed up like Uncle Sam.  Gotta love New York City!  We bought a few small things for Evan, a New York license plate with his name on it, a toy double-decker bus and a toy taxi cab car.

Once we left the Consulate, I glanced through the letter and thought it was good.  For some reason I wanted to see the letter again, and it was then I realized that our agency name was not in the letter!!!  We rushed back to the Consulate, told the man that greeted us the situation.  He had us sit down to wait for gentleman to get back from lunch, which was only 10 minutes.  Once back in his office, he changed the letter to include the agency name, and then we were done.  For sure this time!  At this point we decided to head back to Penn Station and get a train back to New Haven.  We took the 2:00 train, arrived there about 3:30ish and headed home.  We walked through the door at 8:30PM Tuesday evening!

The Consulate office was clean and everyone seemed nice.  Most people there were doing paperwork for passports, visas, etc.  Needless to say, we stuck out.  :-)  I'm sure they were all wondering what we were doing there. It's such a relief to have our dossier completed!  Now we're curious to see what else Honduras will ask for.