����MarnCo, the multinational behind The Big Adventure, has always taken great pride in the fact that it gives snippets of a life where nothing ever happens.

����And now the unthinkable has occured. The spousal unit and I are actually going to have A Big Adventure. This fall we are going to OZ-FREAKIN'-STRALIA for a month.

����MarnCo is appalled by this unexpected turn of events, as you can well imagine. Their spin doctors are hard at work and they have made me promise the three readers of The Big Adventure to try to keep this Oz-freakin'-stralia trip as dull as possible.

���� I give you my word I will, provided Paul and I can actually FIND the place, eh. We didn't do so well finding the passport office this morning.

����Yep step one of The Oz-freakin-stralia Adventure was get passport pictures taken, find birth certificates, get guarantors, fill out applications for new passports and take them into Montreal so we can start the ticket to Australia business in motion.

����Instead of going in to the passport office downtown (the one we could find easily) the spousal unit thought it would be a good idea to go to the one out in Cote Vertu, a section of Montreal in which we've never been.

����It would save time, he said, said he.

����*Insert loud annoying buzzer sound here.* He could not have been more wrong.

����First off, we slept through our alarm. So instead of getting up really early and beating rush hour traffic into Montreal, we got stuck right smack in the middle of rush hour. Fine. Then, as we're listening to the traffic report on the radio, the announcer cheerfully mentioned that there had been an accident on the Champlain Bridge and there would be a 40 minute delay getting into the city.

����And who was sitting in the small blue Marnmobile right smack in the middle of that delay? Oh yeah, Marn and Paul.

����Fine.

����We finally get on to the island and things are going along quite smoothly until we hit the infamous Decarie Circle. The turn for the road we needed was not particularly well marked and before we knew it we were somehow going in the opposite direction.

����Fine. We pull over, there is much map studying and an alternative route is planned. I am so biting my tongue at this point. We finally did manage to wend our way to Cote Vertu Road and turned right on it, which of course turned out to be the wrong direction.

����Fine.

����We eventually found a way off this major artery, got back on the other side, and got to passport building. It should have taken us two hours from our door to the passport office. It took over three.

����And they're going to let us roam around Oz-freakin-stralia?

����Uh oh.