The holiday Passport Saga

"But sir", he said in his heavily accented English, "they're not open until Tuesday. Monday is a bank holiday". It was at that point my jaw hit the counter. In my very broken, rusty French, the counter attendance, slightly better English, we'd cleaned the crux of the matter. No your parcel isn't here, and you (a) can't find out the parcel number as the visa office will be closed (b) the post office will be closed. Stood in the blazing Saturday morning sun in 'La Poste', Belle vue sur Mer, the wonderful 2 weeks holiday seem to disappear. I had no passport, we had flights from Frankfurt, over 1000km away, on Monday evening. The passport, 'somewhere' between Paris and Nice (ish).
The long story short. I had my Aussie residency granted (another story in itself) had arrived. The big problem, you have to leave the country, get your passport 'evidenced' whilst abroad, and enter back through passport control on your new visa. Archaic you might think, yes i'd agree, but okay lets play with that. There was surely no point in planning another week away just to get the passport. But our original plans for the holiday did not include more than 5 days in any one spot. The real kicker is that you need to allow 3 business days for your exit from Australia to register with the foreign offices, then another 5 days for the office to process, then the delay to pickup or post to you. This would be all too good, except where we were going there is no Australian Embassy. None in Nice, none in Switzerland. Only Paris, Berlin or Rome. So the decision, post / courier (registered of course!) the passport to Paris from Chamonix, then get it returned to our Friends residence near where we were finishing up the holiday. All went to plan, email correspondance confirmed everything had arrived, was processed and sent back within 3 days - v. impressive. We then had hope when friends said they'd been one of those "we delivered but you weren't in cards" at their Villa. The only draw back, which we only discovered on Saturday a.m. on the last weekend - this was in fact just a " you've successfully SENT your documents and they've arrived. At this point all sorts of issues arose - we didn't have the tracking number of the sent postage (from the visa office in paris), we'd just been told it was a public holiday on monday, and no idea where the parcel was.
So our original plan of leaving on Sunday, leisurely drive north, perhaps a stop in Annecy, flying back on Monday night, was not really going to happen. Luckily there was lots of availability so flights weren't the issue (apart from a later start at work!). The problem was just not knowing when the passport would arrive. Could be Tues, who knew.... Anyhow, managed to be very nochalant about it over the weekend, well "what can you" I'd say, which was true, totally out of my hands. So we proceeded to enjoy the weekend. Not really that hard in the sundrenched cote d'azure town, a "fairly" relaxed gorgeous girlfriend, a fantastic collection of old Uni friends, an incredible wedding, no work and a not too shabby hotel room.
It was all a bit of an anti-climax in the end, Tuesday I shot to the post office immediately. The passport was there. Right, checkout (well luckily Rochelle managed all that whilst I was battling with traffic), throw everything into the car, and start the long hall back. This time however we had decided on the France, Italy, Switzerland & Germany route. Again, not a good start to the journey as the single file traffic inched its way from Nice to Monaco. Luckily we got to Italy and then started to open up the Alpha, it may not handle well on the alpine routes, but once cranked up to the 150+ would cruise quite nicely. Its well known the Italians, bless their coffee drinking, olive oil eatening hearts, like to disregard road speed limits.... when in Rome! The same was basically true of Switzerland and especially Germany. We had a day in 4 countries, a real novelty for my antipodean lovely, and quite entertaining when you think about it! We managed to accomplish the trip, a touch over a 1000kms in just over 8 hours, 2 petrol stops and almost $250 aussie peso's worth of fuel. We had an extensive 3 hours in the first class lounge at the airport. An eventless flight, no good movies I might add (maybe Sahara http://www.saharamovie.com/, which is a bit of a laugh), was followed by a rather arduous 2 days at the office...