Another step closer to Australia – no, haven’t got the plane tickets yet but we renewed our passports on Monday.

What a production – we spent the night at the timeshare in Victoria so we could get an early start on the day. I don’t know what time John was up but he came back to the condo at 6 a.m. and told me there were already 25 people in the lineup and that we had to get there right away. Well, you probably know I’m not a morning person so I grumbled a bit and then said I’d go but I was sleeping in the van until the offices were opening. Yeah, right! My cell phone rang at 7:30 and John told me to get into the lineup as one of the passport office employees would be handing out the initial set of numbers at about 8. By this time the lineup was all the way down the block to Douglas Street and the commissionaire was telling the people who were still arriving that it was touch and go as to whether they would get into the office on Monday.

I was waking up by this time (especially since John had got me an extra large coffee at the nearby McDonald’s). When the tickets were handed out, we were at almost the end of the second group of people (there were only 2 people behind us) – and we waited about an hour outside. It was nice weather and the people around us were a lot of fun so the wait wasn’t too bad. We were so excited when we were allowed into the building – we thought it would be over soon and we’d have the whole day ahead of us.

But no – we then got a second set of numbers and had to wait to be called up for a preliminary inspection of our paperwork. Of course, we were at the end of the lineup so it took quite a while to make it to the first step. Luckily, our paperwork was in order so we were given another number and we had to sit down and wait for it to be called so the paperwork could be processed. This turned out to be very interesting – there were A#’s, B#’s, C#’s and D#’s (along with more E#’s – which were the preliminary paperwork numbers). The display board would display the number being served and the agent you were to report to. The letters weren’t in any kind of apparent order – there would be an A, then a D, then a B and then another A. It was a little aggravating but we still had our “friends“ from the lineup in the same area and we were getting a little rowdy. I think they finally gave up and called us just to get us out of the office.

The actually processing only took about 15 minutes (for the 2 of us) – the passports will be mailed to us within 3 weeks. That`s a change from the last time we got passports when we had to go back to Victoria to pick them up. The entire process took 5 hours – from the time we got into the lineup until we were back on the street. Hopefully by the time another 5 years has passed, the process will be even more streamlined.