Travel Approval

We finally got the call for travel approval.  Normally, it wouldn't take more than a few days after the Article 5 pick up, but we got caught in an audit.  Apparently, the CCCWA (China Center for Children's Welfare and Adoption), felt it was the right time to audit the paperwork of families who were in process at this time.  Had our paperwork been a little earlier or a little later, we would have received our travel approval sooner.

But the timing is ok.  Had we gotten the approval, we would have had to agonize over the question of whether to rush to travel before the trade fair or wait.  Now it seems pretty obvious that we'd wait until May.  Our travel advisor at the adoption agency thought an April 11th gotcha day might be possible, but with our plans to travel to Korea before heading to China, that means we'd probably leave on April 4th - 5 days from now!  That's probably not going to happen.

Our next step is to confirm travel dates with the adoption agency.  We'll keep you posted when we have travel confirmed.

Article 5

Last night as we were talking about the coming weeks and months, we wondered when the next step, which is the issuance of Article 5, would happen.  In fact, Dana had sent an e-mail to our case worker at Great Wall earlier that night. This morning, when I checked my e-mail, I realized that I had an e-mail with Article 5 approval.  So we're one step closer and now we just wait for Travel Approval (TA).

We had a meeting with our travel coordinator last week and she offered 3 possible "gotcha day" options based on expected paperwork processing.  The earliest would be March 28.  The next would be April 5 and the one after that would be May 9.  Gotcha days typically happen on a Monday, but the April 5th date is a Tuesday (also the date of the Wisconsin presidential primary) due to the Chinese Qingming Festival (also referred to as tomb sweeping day) on April 4.  Then you'll notice a gap between April 5 and May 9.  In the Guangzhou area during April, there is a large trade fair called the Canton Fair.  Due to a shortage of hotel rooms our travel costs would spike so we would travel after the fair is complete.  But we can't make any travel plans until we get the TA, so now we're just waiting on that.