Our passports do not expire until next March but Pat noticed that the Royal Carribean cruise (which we will be taking in early October)  requires that we cannot cruise if our Passport expires within 6 months.  My arguement was this was based on citizens from countries (that Jacques Parizeau referred to after losing the 1995 separation referendum as “ethinics”)  that neither the US or Canada want to jump from the ship.

But NO.  Pat says we have to follow the rules, so we went off yesterday to the local (in Courtenay) Federal office to renew our passports.  We first stopped off at the local photo shop to have our passport photos taken.  Instructions were, no glasses and look as depressed as you can.   $20  later we head the 2 blocks to the the local passport office where we are told (a) our pictures are not the right size (by 1 mm) and we cannot get our passports for minimum 6 weeks due to mailing times. 

So as we were in a panic today (because we do leave to the US for a cruise in 5 weeks) so we spent 8 hours driving down to Victoria where there is an actual primary Canadian Passport office that offers 2 week turnaround.  Actually a very nice day, but we could have done this a month ago when we went down to pick up Ariana.

Now here is the good news.  Neither Pat or I blamed each other over this issue (we blamed federal civil servants) , we had a great book on CD to listen to, and the weather was wonderful. 

I am not a big fan of Sue Grafton books, but if you have 8 hours to kill while driving, it covers the time. 

Now we just have to hope that the passports get here in time or we will have to sneak into US to get to our cruise.