July 22, 2015: Getting Our International Driver’s Permits

I was up a bit late last night working on the MangoLassi update from 0.7.0 to 0.7.1.  It went mostly smoothly and I think that the site is running a little better today.

Dominica and I got up this morning and we were right off to Houston to go to the AAA office up there because, other than getting our car registered here in Texas, our other big task this week is to get our International Driver’s Permits issues so that we are fully legal to drive wherever we go.  We have a rental car for our time in Panama coming up here and we do not want to have any issues.  We had some issues in Spain not having one and we do not want to run into that again so we are going to be careful to keep these up to date and ready to go at all times.  We have to get them issued once a year, which is a bit of a pain.

The drive up to the AAA office on the west side of Houston near Richmond and Sage took almost an hour.  The actual AAA office was able to do the pictures, make the IDLs and have them back to us in about thirty minutes which was nice.  Not overly expensive although this is something like a $60 per year tax on traveling abroad to add to the laundry list of things like that.

We went right back to the house after getting our IDLs.  I had to get back in order to get to work.  It was almost noon (when my start of day meeting is) by the time that we had gotten back between the hour drive to the north, the paperwork and the hour drive back.

Dominica took the girls over to the Grices’ for the day so that I could work at home in peace.  Then this evening Dominica asked me to go pick up Thai for dinner.  That took a bit of driving because of all of the construction.  I picked up the family from the Grices’ on the way back home.

We watched some more Big Bang Theory tonight while Dominica worked on more of our Panama packing.  So much packing to be done.  The packing (and the cost) is definitely the worst part of all of the traveling that we do.

So excited to be going to Central America, though.  A new adventure and just a few days away.