Almost leaving on a jet plane (well, make that 6 jet planes)

We are counting down to Paris and Barcelona!  I have been and will be spending this week packing, repacking, and repacking, as I am wont to do, particularly when we are flying carry-on only.  I have a whole packing post ready to go for when we return, edited to include what worked and what didn't and what I wish we had done differently.

In the meantime, there is still much planning to be done, including, in no particular order:

• Communicating with our Airbnb hosts.  Thus far, I have been very impressed with the communication tools.  You can exchange emails through the website, and the responses show up as texts on your phone, as well, which will be very convenient when we are on the go.  Our Barcelona host seems a bit more comfortable with the process than our Paris host, but both have answered all my questions quickly and comprehensively, and I'm looking forward to our stays at both apartments.  Just to clarify, since someone asked, we are staying in apartments that don't have any current tenants in both cases.  I decided that for our first foray into Airbnb, I wanted to have places that had a few things as possible in them for the boys to disturb!
• Determining the metro stops closest to our attractions of choice.  I like to have at least some idea of where I am headed, even if we end up changing plans/route on the fly.
• Deciding whether or not if would be to our advantage to get a multi-day transport pass.  Right now it looks like Barcelona, no, Paris, yes.  Paris has an option that is exactly what we need for considerably less than the individual metro trips would be, while in Barcelona we will simply get a few ten-ride passes and use those instead.
• Hunting down restaurants near our chosen destinations.  This is really just a back-up plan in case inspiration fails us while we are out and about, or insane hunger hits and we haven't seen anywhere that looks like somewhere we want to eat, or we forget that almost everything is closed in Barcelona on Sundays.  Our plan is to eat breakfasts on the go from bakeries, lunches out, and dinners back at our apartments, but we are ever flexible on meals and will probably end up doing a lot of snacking all day long to keep the boys energized while we are walking from place to place.
• Marveling at the euro!  I have never traveled to Europe when the euro has been this low in comparison to the dollar and that fact, combined with coming from uber-expensive Qatar, suddenly makes Spain and France seem like bargain lovers' paradises--what the what??  I may actually do a little shopping beyond souvenirs this trip, something I have never, ever done in Europe (except for that little but totally necessary bit of shoe shopping we did in Frankfurt last year).  As one of my friends put it recently, all of Europe appears to be on sale!
• Figuring out the boys' travel toy situation.  I usually make them a flight pack with new pens/markers, a new notebook, a new little toy and some old favorites, and some special snacks, but our first flight out is a very red-eye (we are leaving at 1:50am because I have a hard time reading the 24 hour clock--whoops!), so they won't need much to entertain them at first.  However, since we will be in apartments, they will need some toys for playing with when we are back for the evening, so I will be deciding just how many or, more accurately, how few of those we will be taking.  I don't usually bring Legos traveling because they really aren't the greatest airplane toys, but they entertain the boys for so long and in so many other situations, I may resurrect our Lego travel boxes I made a while back.  We shall see....

Through all of this, I will be trying very, very hard not to be nervous about flying in the wake of the recent Germanwings disaster.  We will be flying almost that same route twice, from Paris to Barcelona and then back again.  It is so shocking, as it always is when someone kills others wantonly, but, in a post 9/11 world, using a plane as a weapon makes us all just a little bit more...afraid? worried? sad? fatalistic?  I don't know.  I wish these kinds of tragedies were becoming fewer and farther between instead of more and more frequent, affecting more and more innocent people.