Update to Yesterdays Update!

So....I'm not sure how I'm feeling right now. I'm not so sure that going on this vacation to Jamaica was meant to be. I finally got through to someone last night with the passport stuff. A man answered my "on hold" call at 5 minutes to 10pm after waiting for an hour on hold. First off, I must just say that the gentleman that I spoke with was so kind and so helpful, very grateful that I was able to speak with him. Now for the bad news, remember how I said that when I called last week the gal told me that the passports had been printed and just needed to be approved/stamped....well she lied to me. My passport and Allison's passport hadn't even been printed. The man, his name was Justin, said that they were far from being printed. We have a week before we leave, and it's a holiday weekend, so it is going to make it extremely hard for our passports to get to us. Justin did everything in his power and in his supervisors power to help me out. After an hour and half on the phone, he suggested that I try to get an appointment with the agency in New Orleans for Friday or Saturday, well the office there is only open on M-W-F, so this Friday I would have to go, however, I would have to leave (fly out) on Thursday in order to be at the office first thing in the morning, as it can take a full day for it to be "Emergency" printed. I could go to chicago, but I have to have the original documents in order to get the passport, but our documents are in New Orleans.
Then we ran into another problem, in order to get Allison's passport, I need a letter written and signed by Chuck that it's okay for me to get the passport, and it has to be notarized. Again, I'm in Iowa, Chuck is still in Kansas City. Almost impossible to get that, unless he were to write it and overnight mail or even same day, but he would have to get it notarized, but he can't do that b/c he is working from 7am to 7pm. After I got off the phone with Justin, I called Chuck, and decided that it would just be too much to try to fly down there and it would cost us 500 bucks plus hotel to get there, which we currently don't have that money to do that.
So back to on the phone with Justin, he put a 2 hour rush on our passports, which means, when the agency or whoever prints the passports receives the message that our passports are URGENT, they'll pull them and print them within 2 hours and have them mailed out the same day. Now that's great, but I wonder how many other people are having this done, so I maybe have a 1 in 1 million chance of getting the passports mailed today. however, I am hoping that we will get them on Tuesday, the day before we leave.
We have insurance on our trip, but Chuck said that this would not be covered. But I did get some sort of good news this morning when we called the NWA World Vacations, whom we booked our trip through, and the gal told me that we have 2 options if we don't have our passports.
Option 1) Call today or tomorrow (within 48 hours) to cancel and we will be refunded our money as we paid for it. So the money would go straight back to our bank account. Then we could just reschedule our vacation for another date if we wanted to, but it can't be rescheduled during the time period that we would be on our trip. So therefore, we can't go until after June 4. And it would cost $100 per person to do this. But we would also have to reschedule our trip in 48 hours and take the trip within 3 months is what I understood..
Option 2) This gives us until the day of our trip to cancel and we will be refunded our money in vouchers, so this way we would have to use them towards a trip, which is fine. It also gives us the extra days to receive our passports, so if we didnt have our passports in the mail Tuesday afternoon, we could call and cancel and all it would cost is the $170 we paid for the insurance on the trip. And we have a year to use the vouchers. So pretty much we would be fully refunded.
So I think we are going to do option 2. Chuck is working today, and i called to tell him that we could cancel and be refunded but he was just getting ready to go up to the Helicopter to go pick a kid up...so hopefully i'll get to talk to him soon so we can discuss options.

So I guess we just have to do the waiting game some more. I'm hoping and praying that we will get the passports on Friday or Saturday. If not then, hopefully on Tuesday!!! I didn't sleep too well last night and neither did Allison, had too much on my mind, however I'm just drained. When I was talking to Justin about the passports I was extremely emotional and stressed out and was actually crying and very upset. I wish I knew Justin's last name so I could write him a letter. I was able to speak to his supervisor and give my positive comments to him. I also wish I would have wrote down the name of the gal I spoke with last week so she would get a negative comment from me for lying! It would be nice if everyone that worked for the passport stuff was as nice and helpful as Justin. Just wanted to add, he said that this is the longest he has ever been on the phone with someone for dealing with passports.
Okay well that's enough for now. Hopefully my next blog will be saying "WE GOT OUR PASSPORTS" as the headline!
Hope everyone is doing better than we are right now! HAHA! Today I'm going to try to relax and them attempt to call the agency again tonight to see if the passports had been printed yet.
Until then!!!