Fingerprinting

Yesterday we had our appointment to be fingerprinted by the US Dept of Immigration/Homeland Security. It was for 9 AM and we had about a 2 hour drive to a town we had never been to before. We ran MapQuest the night before and had Lula (the GPS) in the glove box in case we needed her. We left in plenty of time, got to the right town.....and our directions took us off course (we ended up on Blah Blah Court, instead of Blah Blah Plaza). OK, break out Lula, and she takes us to the same place as MapQuest. HHMMM, it says this building is South of "Such and Such Mall", on "Such and Such road"..... Turn around, plug the Mall's name into Lula and off we go again. OOOHHHH, the address they gave is not the name of the road, is is the name of the plaza a strip mall is in. Now, silly me, I expected a large govenment building, maybe something like a Court House. Nope, a store in the stip mall, with the first half of the sign missing so we had to find it by the store address number. What a let down. Our letter of invitation to be fingerprinted had expressly stated no cameras or cell phones would be allowed, so again figuring it would be similar to a Court House experience, we left all knives (just Stanely knives, folks), tools (learned that one when Mike had to run his wire strippers out to the car before we could go into the court house to get a copy of something he needed), and our phones in the car. I was ready for my purse to be searched and to walk through the metal detector. Another let down, there was a security gaurd, but he only checked our ID to our letter and gave us paperwork to fill out. No metal detectors, no bag search, they didn't even question us to whether we were carrying a cell phone. There was no wait, and I think we were in and out of the office in about 10 minutes (counting my potty break before we got back into the car for the 2 hour ride home). Seemed like a long drive for such a quick process. But our eye is on the prize and we are closer to making Zach a permanent member of our family.