ET Vidcast #1 - The Walk - Our walk from our flat to the University, so everyone else can experience the sights and sounds with us :)

To play the video, all you should have to do is push play and it will stream. On shakier connections (if you notice a lot of pauses), you may want to then press pause and wait for it to download some of it in advance before you press play again.

If you need to catch up, check out PART 1 of the story first! :)

So Tara and I drive to Dallas on Friday the 11th because my birthday is the next day and my parents are in Dallas through the weekend. Long story short, my car flat out DIES on the way to Dallas. That is another story in itself, so I won't bore you with the details, but feel free to ask :) We have a good weekend with the fam, my parents fly back to Cali on Sunday and we drive back to San Antonio (in a rental car). We hear back from Trudy (Consulate friend) on Monday, and she tells us that their hands are really tied. The only way that Tara can get over is on a work permit, as a student or as a dependant (aka married). They won't even let her go over on a vistor visa because with me over there, she has too much incentive to not come back (yes, I am THAT loveable). So we discuss it, and we decide that getting married is our best option if we plan on going to Scotland. We had been together over 6 years and we had been planning on getting married for some time....we just sped up a little bit (though sped up is NOT the term many would use! ha)....sooooooooooooo.....

On Tuesday morning the 15th, we call our parents and tell them we are going to the courthouse to get our marriage license. My parents (who had just gotten back to Cali) suggested we get the license but NOT get married by the judge, because they wanted to come down. We agreed and got the license and then went off to get wedding rings! We also called the rest of our immediate family and close friends to tell them all the good news. As my parents travelled to San Antonio, they along with Tara's parents and the concierge at La Mansion were planning a beautiful little ceremony for the next day. My sister Jenni drove down from Dallas that night (and met us as Tara was picking out a dress). The next morning, Jen made us a nice breakfast, and then Tara was wisked away to an undisclosed location (La Mansion) to get ready for the big day. My dad picked me up and drove me downtown to La Mansion, where we met with everyone else. To this point, nor Tara or I knew of any of these plans. We were taken to a little location along the Riverwalk called MARRIAGE ISLAND, where the ceremony was to take place. Tara, of course, looked beautiful, and the ceremony was wonderful. Despite such short notice (24 hours is short notice!), the wedding was absolutely stunning and went off without a hitch!



Many thanks to the lovely concierge at La Mansion, CJ, for running around and putting this all together for us!

You can see a lot more pictures in our picture gallery!

The rest of that week, my parents stayed in San Antonio with us as we packed up our apartment, put all of our things in storage and got ready to move! We decided to give ourselves a few more days and pushed our flight back to leave on August 28th. After last minute arrangements and packing was done, Tara and I said our goodbyes to the US and left for Glasgow, Scotland! I'll leave the trip and many more stories for later....feel free to leave comments or drop us an email (links on the right) to say hello!

Welcome to our blog at EricLovesTara.com! I guess the most appropriate thing to blog about first is our story and what we are up to! This might get long-winded, but bear with me....you'll enjoy :)

Most of you that know us know that Tara and I studied in Stirling, Scotland for a semester when we were in college. After I graduated from Southwestern and Tara from Trinity in 2002, we had always talked about moving back to Scotland. I applied to Graduate School at the University of Glasgow for the Fall of 2003, but for numerous reasons, we just weren't ready to move from San Antonio yet. I deferred my acceptance and we actually went through this process again in 2004 and 2005. In early 2006, Tara and I had again talked about the possibility of moving to Scotland in the Fall, as we both were ready for a change of pace and venue. In June 2006, I had a business trip outside London, so we decided to go over a week early to Scotland to scope out the possibility of living in Glasgow, Scotland. We found a flat that we deemed "perfect" and were very excited....up until the point that they said that "no pets were allowed." This was a non-starter for us, since our 2 cats are our babies. Tara was also hoping to apply for a work visa, and actually interviewed at a very nice private school in Glasgow. The interview went VERY well, and they essentially told her that hadthey not posted the job ahead of her contacting them, they wouldn't even have bothered. The problem was, the actual interviews were a week later (they nornally do all interviews on the same day), and in the week between, it seems that they found the process of applying for a foreign work visa too difficult for someone that may or may not even be staying more than one year. Unfortunately, she did not get the job teaching at this school, but we knew we would figure something out, if we in fact did decide we were for sure moving to Scotland. This summer, when we were in Galveston for 2 weeks, we had a lot of long walks on the beach and did a lot of talking about our options. Tara made the decision to quit her job at Wilderness Oak Elementary School and we were off on a path to prepare ourselves to move abroad.

This included a large garage/moving sale, selling off furniture, packing most of our things to get them ready for a storage unit and applying for visas! The application for our visas was (seemed) very simple. We filled out the applications, sent off our application fees and waited for the response. It really did seem TOO easy. My visa was a student visa and Tara was applying for a "Working Holidaymaker" visa so that she could work part time. Mind you, we already had our plane tickets booked to leave on August 24, 2006 and this was the beginning of August! On August 9th, we get a call from Agnes, the lady who is handling our visas. She tells us that my visa is fine but Tara's visa is going to be denied because she technically applied for the wrong visa....the working holidaymaker is only for those residing in Commonwealth countries, which we in the US are not. We were a bit thrown, but Ag said that she would hold off on stamping it DENIED until we figured out what we wanted to do. We scrambled and stressed and told our parents on that Thursday. My parents have a friend back in Half Moon Bay that used to work for the Australian Consulate, and she has a friend that WORKS in the British Consulate. After some talks with her, she said to leave it up to her and she would see what she could work out. We were feeling a bit better, though quite uneasy....

Ok, so it's long-winded, but it's a good story....check out PART 2 for the rest!