Be allowed to stay in the UK.

I mentioned in my last post that Andrew and I organised a last minute trip to Scotland on the August bank holiday weekend. The purpose of which was not entirely recreational. The main reason we had to go to Scotland was to renew my visa.

My visa was due to expire on September 1^st and needed to be renewed before then. In mid-August I started researching renewal options. It was then that we realised that if I had applied by post it could have take up to 14 weeks for the application to be processed. Since you have to send your passport in with your application, you're without passport for this time. Not usually a problem but we had a pre-booked trip to Slovakia for the last weekend in August. We'd be flying back into London on the 2nd of September, the day after my visa expired.

You kinda need a passport and/or visa to get back into the country, so applying by post was out. Obviously I had to apply in person. After a quick call to the visa hotline to make an appointment, we discovered that Croydon (the office which is closest to London) was totally booked out. The only availability was at Sheffield (2 hours north), Liverpool (4 hours north-west) and Glasgow (in Scotland). We decided to book an appointment for the Friday before the bank holiday in Glasgow and then turn it into a mini-break.




So in the end, it was a great weekend. The visa application process went very smoothly and only took an hour. There were no queues, I just went from window to window. Submitting the application, making the payment and then receiving the visa. It made me giggle when they weren't interested in my financial situation at all. They were only interested in Andrew's financial records. As it's a spousal visa and I'm dependant on him, he has to show that he can keep me in the style to which I've become accustomed. Obviously he can, as we got the stamp of approval.




We managed to see Stirling Castle, Loch Ness, Inverness, Highland Games, more castles, more lochs and some of the beautiful Scottish Highlands. And we made it back to London on Monday afternoon in time to see some of the Carnival.




I'm a little bit ashamed because I'm usually quite organised about these kind of things. But we certainly made the best of a bad situation. You can't complain about a chance to see more of Scotland.