Pre-adventures in India

Getting ready to depart for a foreign country is never easy. Especially when you are applying for your visas 6 weeks before you depart and you realize that since becoming married, your wife's passport has not been changed to her now changed name. It was only after the fact that we now realize changing your name on all legal documents is the single most important task after getting married. If you don't change your name, it means you can not apply for a visa until the passport has been changed-which is a two week process. It actually takes longer if in the middle of the processing the government decides it doesn't want to accept your only copy of your marriage license as proof of marriage. This would mean that you must reorder another marriage certificate from the state you were married in (which in our case is a different from the state we reside) and wait for them to ship it to you--only to ship in out again the very next hour at exhorbitant shipping rates.

Once we recieved our renewed passport we only had 10 business days before we departed to get our visas--the same amount of days required to process our application. Luckily, we recieved our passports yesterday. This saved much stress, but still goes to show that changing your name on all your documents after you get married is the single most important thing to do.