Do It Yourself

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on the blog yet, but we’re taking a trip to Africa later in the year.

And it’s a good thing it’s later in the year, because, man, there are a lot of things to accomplish before taking a trip to Africa!

Multiple vaccinations. Check (well, mostly anyway). We’re going to be the paranoid Americans who get vaccines for rabies and meningitis as well as the “necessary” shots even though, well, we could get rabies or meningitis right here in the good old USA.

(Getting a rabies vaccination reminds me of an episode of The Office. Yes, rabies is indeed a preventable disease, Michael. I digress.)

Passports. Check. (Already have them. Whew.)

Flight arrangements. Check. (Thanks to some time-consuming research I win the prize for finding a flight between African countries – because we’re going to Ghana and Uganda – for $1000 less than we were about to shell out.)

Notifying the friends we’re visiting in Ghana. Check. (They are so excited we’re coming to visit.)

Signing up for a Compassion Sponsor Tour and paying our deposit. Check. (Because that’s why we’re going to Uganda – to visit Ronald, our sponsored child! A sponsor tour happened to come available after we had already decided to go to Ghana this year anyway.)

(By the way, if you’d like to contribute to our trip we are gladly accepting donations. Because what with the vaccines, the cost of the trip, the airfare, and the visas we feel as if things are getting a little out of control!) :-)

And that brings me to: Visas. Not done yet.

Both Ghana and Uganda require visas for tourists. Uganda needs the application in duplicate. Ghana requires the application form in QUADRUPLICATE. Each application, besides the visa fee and a postage-paid return overnight mailer, requires a passport photo.

Last weekend we discovered that passport photos are not cheap. And we need a total of 12 passport photos between the two of us. Yikes!

So, we left the store without the goods in hopes that we could find a cheaper way to get passport photos.

One word: ePassportPhoto.com.

OK. That’s more like two and a half words smooshed together in a web address, but whatever.
If ever you need multiple passport photos, this is the place to go. You can take your own digital photo, use their cropping mechanism to obtain the right size and proportions for the photo, and then download the file onto your computer…FOR FREE. We did end up sending it to Clark Color Photo for printing, but that was only $1.50 for all the pictures.

This is a brilliant tip, so I hope somebody who needs passport photos will google “cheap passport photos” and find out about this awesome service.

Now I just need to fill out all the forms and get some certified checks together to apply for the visas (which we are boldly also doing ourselves rather than pay an extra $150 or $200 for a passport service to do it for us; we figure there’s plenty of time for problems at this point).

You know us…it’s all about doing it yourself to save some money.