Found it

I'm leaving next Monday for nearly a month in Brisbane.  It will be the longest holiday I've had at home for many a year.  I will also be attending a family wedding and visiting a dear friend on the central coast of New South Wales.  I've spent many hours in the past two weeks, when I should have been happily anticipating my holiday, searching for my passport.  I have places for 'things', I guess we all do.  I've always said my memory is so bad everything has to be in its place or I will never find it. 

I knew where it was.  I took it out of a document wallet thingy when I got the wallet out to take to my daughter for her to use on her upcoming trip to the UK and Europe.  I left it on top of the bedroom dresser along with my immunisation card.   By the way, both my daughters will be travelling far and wide in August/September.  They will meet up briefly in Paris.  Jealous?  Who me?

A couple of weeks ago I noticed the immunisation card was still sitting where I left it, but it was alone.  I thought I must have picked the passport up and put it in its rightful place and didn't think about it again for a few days.  Until I happened to open its rightful place and noticed it wasn't there.  And that's when the search began.  

I have been growing increasingly desperate.  I kept expecting to wake up one morning and remember moving it.  But when this morning dawned I admitted to myself that it was lost and made enquiries about having an emergency passport issued by Friday.  (My flight is early Monday.)  

The good news was that is possible, the bad news was that will cost $496.00.  The young lady at the Australian Embassy was very helpful and emailed me all the details. She very politely suggested I conduct another thorough search of my home and perhaps request someone else to have a look as well.  Did she sum me up so quickly or are there lots of passport losing people out there?

So I started another search, telling myself if it didn't turn up, I'd ask my daughter-in-law to have another look for me tomorrow.   I got distracted when I remembered I had to retrieve Georgia's carefully hidden birthday present.  And that's what saved the day.  I knew where to look for the present and when I reached for it, I saw a rarely used travel beauty case.  Is that what they call them these days?  And guess what was in it?  A roll on deodorant, a book mark and the blankety blank passport! 

I'm not even going to try to imagine how or why.  Dorothy is going to Oz.