Paperwork time…A reality and responsibility of traveling the world…

It’s a well operating out of a local’s house in our neighborhood.
“Sightings on the Beach in Bali”
Buffaloes swimming together in the river alongside the villa.

There are currently three batches of documents to complete and process:
1.  Absentee ballots for the upcoming election on November 8th in the US
2.  Visa extension for Indonesia
3.  Tom’s driver license renewal

In just over two weeks, we’ll have to go to Lovina’s immigration office. The forms we used previously must be redone with the correct dates and information.

We’ll continue to post photos from the harrowing four or five hour drive. This is a glass shop which surely had glasa blowers in a back room making these items for sale.

This time when we apply for the visa extension we’ll be driving to Lovina on our own without Gede with us. He’ll have to create a somewhat complicated letter as our sponsor which is written in Indonesian. He was with us last time we visited the immigration office and processed the sponsorship in person.

This time, since we’re going on our own, Gede will have to sit beside me while I type the information into a document  while he translates the form which we’ll print and bring along when we apply. 

We weren’t near the airport.  This is a display of a jet engine atop a building behind many power lines.

Tom’s driver’s license expires on December 23rd. Nevada DMV doesn’t allow an applicant to submit the paperwork sooner than 60 days prior to the expiration date. The paperwork can be submitted by fax so we’ll prepare it all, email it to son Richard in Nevada and he’ll fax it from his office.

Once the renewal license is issued it can’t be mailed to our address in Nevada per their regulations.  It can only be mailed to an outside Nevada address. Daughter Tammy will handle this for us; receiving the license at her home address and placing the license into another envelope with a stamp. She’ll immediately mail it to our mailing service in Nevada.

Vegetation growing on the roof of a restaurant in Denpasar.

Once the mailing service receives it, they’ll ship it to us wherever we are at the time to arrive within 3 to 5 days by expedited international shipping. If we don’t receive the license in time for the rental car we’ll need in Tasmania, we’ll rent the car in my name since my license doesn’t expire until February 20, 2017.

I’ll have to go through the same process 60 days prior to my license expired.  At least, this one time, we’re allowed to do this by mail and fax. Next time, in four more years, we’ll have to appear in person. We’ll certainly keep this in mind when we begin to plan far into the future for 2020.  Gosh, that sounds like a long time away, but it’s only four years.

This is a modern furniture store in Denpasar.

The next item, the absentee ballots, must be processed by this upcoming Monday in order for us to actually receive the ballots in time for the election. That’s a little tricky as well with regulations varying from US state to state. I won’t bore you with the details.

All of these tasks require a huge amount of printing, scanning, copying and preparation. The printer here isn’t so good, although we can manage to get it to spew out what we need for all three of these transactions.The rest we’ll figure out.

An upscale Italian restaurant, likely visited by tourists in Denpasar.

There’s no doubt that preparing all of these documents is cumbersome and time consuming. To a degree they weigh on our minds. When we work on these types of tasks we do it together, making it a lot easier than doing it solo.

Thank goodness we still have our trusty portable scanner which proves invaluable for many aspects of these types of processes. A camera just doesn’t do a good enough scanning job on letter or legal sized documents.

Colorful display of shop on the main highway.

Once we have these tasks completed, we’ll be relieved and able to spend the remaining days in Bali with our minds free of some big responsibilities other than taking good care of ourselves and continuing to enjoy the balmy breezes, sunshine and exquisite scenery before us.

Take good care of YOURSELF and have a good day!

Photo from one year ago today, September 8, 2015:

We shot this photo from the air on our way to Savusavu. Fiji is comprised of approximately 330 islands, of which one third are inhabited. The two major islands are Viti Levu, the most commonly visited and Vanua Levu where we are staying for the next three months. When boarding this flight we had to be publicly weighed along with our baggage, an experience we’d had in the past.  For more details, please click here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *