Prepping for Europe!

After weeks of waiting, my company finally confirmed I'll be headed to Paris TOMORROW and Barcelona on Saturday. I'm super excited, but there's a lot to do before jetsetting out in 24hours!

In addition to packing clothes and toiletries, business essentials such as laptop, notebooks, power cords and adaptors, I am also in the process of getting an expedited passport renewal. For those who don't know, some countries require you to have your passport valid for 3-6 months after the planned return to the States. In my case, my passport expires 12/3/10, or more importantly 09/03/10, but my planned return is not until 9/9/10.

I found that there are a lot of 3rd party companies that will expedite your passport for you (some legit, some are not. Check with the BBB before trusting any of these), but if you have a Regional Passport Agency nearby I recommend working directly with them. There is an automated phone system that will schedule you an appointment, provide you with a confirmation number and you're set! In my case, I called on Sunday night and the next available appt was Tuesday at noon.

Thank goodness I don't live too far from the city, nor does my company mind if I work from home and take a few hours off here and there, because my quick trip turned into two round trips, once at noon to provide my application, then returning at 3pm to pick up my new passport. I was also 2 minutes away from being on the Parking Wars TV show because when I returned to my car I had a white envelope with a parking ticket inside...stamped TWO minutes prior to me getting there. If I had walked up while someone was writing me a ticket there is no doubt I would have flipped out at the poor sap who was writing it up. (I had just come from a government office where I saw dozens of people, most of which were in security outfits, telling people to put away their drinks, food and cell phones just because they can. 1. get over the power trip, you have no real authority, and 2. you really get paid for that?) I had enough of uniformed officials for one day :)

Packing for two weeks of a business trip is tough! You don't really want to repeat clothes, and two weeks isn't really long enough to do laundry. But I did manage to keep everything to one suitcase, mainly because dragging two bags around would certainly not be fun.