Before I start detailing our trip to Canada, I have just got to tell you about the trip from Venice to Canada.

Our flight from Venice left at 6:30 am. Our travel agent, and the guy at the hotel, was dead set that you needed to be at the airport at least 2 hours before the flight. It turns out that the Venice airport doesn't even open until 5! I know its only 30 minutes, but at that time of morning it was a bitter pill to swallow.

But not the bitterest by a long shot. Did you know (this means you Thor Travel!) that Venice doesn't have taxi's that run between Midnight and 6? No busses either! Bugger! We thought we were pretty clever being in a hotel only 4 km from the airport, but without taxis the only option was to use the hotel shuttle. Like everything else in Venice, this was fairly priced at 35 euro (60 aussie dollars!). We were in the car less than 5 minutes, and to make matters worse, I gave the guy 40 euro in cash and I only got 2 in change, because he took his 3 euro tip as well. Like I said in the last entry, Venice has nice canals, but other than that it bites pretty hard.

Anyway we got on the plane to Frankfurt where we had to transfer for our flight to Montreal. Frankfurt is the biggest bloody airport ever. It is massive, it took us more than 25 minutes to get from one end to the other.

Despite being 10 hours, the flight from Germany to Canada was pretty easy, I had only had about 6 hours sleep in 2 days so I was in la la land for most of it. Karen is usually asleep any time she is sitting down so she was the same. When we got into Montreal and wanted to get to our flight to Halifax, that's when the real fun started.

I use the term fun loosely, more as a synonym for absolute pain in the derriere! The friendly gentleman in customs decided that we looked suspicious enough to warrant pulling all of our bags apart and checking every item. We were carrying 3 bottles of wine and 2 bottles of Scotch.

Those of you who have taken alcohol into Australia before know that between 2 people, this is stuff all. Not in Canada though, he originally presented us with a duty bill of $75! Karen managed to talk him down to $50, but I tell you what, that wine better not be corked!

It gets worse. While he was dicking around looking at our undies, we missed our connecting flight. No real problem, we'll just catch the next one 90 minutes later. But, what do you know, it was delayed by another 90 minutes. It ended up taking us nearly 20 hours to get from Italy to Canada!

When we got to Halifax things started to get much better. First of all, it turns out that the car hire place didn't have any small 4 cylinder cars like we paid for left. So they had to give us a V6 Pontiac Grand Am for the same price. Also, there is a very helpful information booth in the airport, and the lady there booked us a pretty close and yet pretty cheap hotel. We slept well that night I can assure you.