Last Wednesday, Lucas got a call from his parents that his grandmother had passed away. She was 93 years old, and the mother of 9 children! She lived a good, long life, but of course it is still hard for Lucas to loose his last grandmother (his other grandmother passed away earlier this year). Lucas and I discussed what he was going to do, and of course he really wanted to go down to Brazil to be with his family during this time. The only problem is that his Brazilian passport is not current, because we have not been to Brazil in a little over 2 years. We are planning to go in January but were not too concerned with renewing his passport until a little closer to when we were going to go. Well, as far as we knew the Consulate for this region was in Miami (the Consulate when we lived in Texas was in Houston, so a nice, easy drive) Anyways, Lucas called around and figured out that there was actually a Consulate in Atlanta (about a 3.5 hour drive from us). So, he talked to the Cosulate and they said that they close at 1:00 to the public. It was 9:00 at this time and there was no way we could make it there because we had to get all of his documents together and pack so he could make the trip. But they SO generously said that they could see him if he made it there by 2:00, so we quickly packed his bags and were on our way by 10:00. Of course we were about halfway there when we realized that we had TOTALLY forgotten that Atlanta is in a different time zone than us....!!! Well, we arrived at the Consulate at about 2:45 Atlanta time, and thankfully they said that they could still see him. They very generously got his passport together in about 30 minutes (this usually takes at least a couple of weeks!). Once we realized that he was going to be able to get his passport, we started calling the airlines to see who could give us the best price for such a short notice trip. We were in Atlanta, so we were hoping that we could just leave from Atlanta, but for whatever reason, it costs more to leave from Atlanta, than to leave from a smaller airport and still go through atlanta... The airline ticket prices absolutely make no sense to me!!! Anyways, of course the cheapest tickets were from Nashville, but there was NO way that we could make it there in time. So we decided to let him leave from Birmingham. (About 2.5 hours from Atlanta). Well, we left Atlanta at 3:10 and his flight left B-ham at 5:50... Needless to say we were cutting it a little close! We were determined to get him on the plane though. God had been watching over us all day of course, and things were falling into place. Well, miraculously, we drove into B-ham at 5:00 on a weekday and there was NO traffic!!! Amazing. So, we made it to the airport and Lucas was off to spend some time with his family! So, that was our crazy day! We drove 550 miles from Alabama, to Tennessee, to Georgia, to Tennessee, to Georgia and finally back to Alabama...

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