I made it into America finally! I feel like I’ve been travelling forever already and I still have another cross-country flight to go.
So every good travel story starts with a bit of drama and mine is no different…. I go to check in on thurs morning and it says I need to speak to one of the agents to process my check-in. Ok so I ask a dude about it and he says “um your visa expires 27th of August but you are flying back out of the country on the 4th of October…..you can’t do that…” And I say “oh nah mate don’t worry il just hoon up to Canada for a bit” and he says “yeah you could do that but US customs will need some kind of proof of that or else they won’t let you into the country….otherwise you will have to go over to the help desk and get an electronic visa to cover yourself” Righto so over to the help desk we go to see about this electronic visa situation. It’s about quarter past 11 and I am meant to be checked in by 11.30 because I have a connecting international flight chch-auck-lax. (Cue my mother starting to stress out that I’m not going to be even going to America today and I’ve totally screwed everything up haha). Finally we get to the front of the line and I say I want to sort out this visa thing that should only take a couple of minutes right? The info lady was like “whaaaat no girl it takes about 45 mins and there’s no guarantee it will even get approved you are gonna miss your flights!” I say “ah bugger. Well can I sort it now and change my flights to tomorrow?” (Cue mum AND dad now both stressing and tsking and shaking their heads) at this point I think the lady felt a bit sorry for me so she stepped up to the battle field and said “right let’s do this visa and do it fast, we can make it!” So here we are reeling off my passport info and camp info and she is typing furiously and about 10mins later we have whizzed through the visa application and boom everything is awesome. I got the special ESTA thing so that I can travel around the States for the extra time until my flight back home. And the guy at the US customs didn’t even bat an eyelid so it must be all good. Nothing like a bit of stress at the start of a trip to get you buzzing! But next time, I would recommend being more prepared haha. 😝🇺🇸✈️