Update on our visa situation: Dave put in quite a bit of work to get all of us approved for the nomad visa online. He and I were approved in October and the girls were approved in January, however you need to go to an in person appointment to finish things off and we discovered that there were no appointments available until May. Our lawyer told us that as long as we carried our approval letter and proof of our scheduled appointment we were good. So we skipped our next border run which was conflicting with our holiday schedule anyway.

However, we had some nagging doubts about what would happen if we were ever pulled over, so we consulted with another lawyer. This time we were told that while our paperwork made it okay for us to be in the country beyond 90 days, we were not able to legally drive after 90 days because for driving purposes you are considered a tourist until you have your visa card in hand (which you don’t receive until at least a month after your in person appointment). We have tickets to fly home in July so waiting until June to get our official visa cards just doesn’t make sense for us anymore.

We learned all of this on a Thursday, and decided we should probably head to the border as soon as possible to make sure we were legal to drive (our biggest concern was really in terms of our insurance, we wanted to make sure we were covered in the case of an accident and for that we needed an updated tourist visa stamp).

So we sent the girls off to school this morning and made the 2 1/2 hour trip up to the nicaraguan border. We weren’t sure if we’d get hassled due to the fact that we had technically overstayed our last tourist visa, and were getting ready to do some explaining about our nomad visa process. However, it was another pura vida kind of day and everything was smooth sailing. This is almost surely due to the fact that we had a tour company drive us up and take us across. We’ve now met Claudio, our guide, twice and he is a master facilitator.

So in the end, it probably would have made sense to skip the nomad visa all together, but we learned a lot. We will make one more trip to the border in May with the girls to finish things off.