What’s a Schengen?
Never heard that word before? Neither had we until a few weeks ago. So what is it? The Schengen Area is a group of European countries that made an agreement back in the 80’s to loosen restrictions of their mutual borders. For the most part this is really cool, and is one of the things that makes traveling Europe so easy. Basically the borders between countries that signed this agreement go mostly unchecked. So you can travel by car, train, or even plane, between them without having to go through passport, vehicle, or baggage checks. So generally the only way you know if you’re in a different country is if you saw the Road sign, your GPS tells you, or as we’ve come to find out, if your cell service provider sends you a long message in a language you don’t speak letting you know how what services you now have available in whatever country you’ve transferred into.
While this seems like a really cool ability if you’re only here for a week or two on vacation now and then, if you’ve decided to be wild and crazy and just travel around Europe for a few months it throws a couple wrenches into things. Most places you’ll travel to will automatically issue you a Tourist/Travel Visa in the form of your Passport Stamp for anywhere from 30-90 days. This is the frame of mind we were under, and how we planned our travels. However, since most people don’t do this, the whole Schengen thing isn’t really widely known. In fact we found out about it just a few weeks back. The problem we face is that, because there are effectively no travel borders any longer, and people just come and go as they please, one of the stipulations of the Schengen Agreement is that a traveler can only spend 90 days in any combination of the countries in the Schengen Area in any 180 day period. This is a major bummer when your plans range from slightly longer than 90 days, to who knows how long.
Obviously there are ways around this. You can apply for Work or Student Visas, and in some cases a Long Term Stay Visa, which may have been an option if we had enough time for the application process and such. But since we didn’t know, we didn’t apply. Oops. An even larger bummer is that in addition to the usual fines for going over 90 days, one of the penalties for over-staying your welcome can be the refusal of Schengen Area countries to allow you in again. Like ever. So not a good thing considering we’ve found a number of places we’d very much like to return to in the future.
Now that you’ve got an understanding of what the heck a Schengen is, what does it mean for us? Well, basically, we’re headed back across the pond earlier than we figured. Unfortunately we had to cut our visit to Portugal short by a couple weeks, which really sucks because it’s already one of our favorite spots. Oh well. We’ll be back. So, long story short, we’ll be back in Colorado soon! We’ll get to spend Christmas and boys’ birthday with family and friends, and hang out a bit before we head down to Costa Rica to continue our adventure as we originally planned.
In the meantime we’ve got numerous topics for blog posts, so we’ll have plenty to talk about until we begin our travels in Costa Rica. We want to thank all of you who have been reading along very much. It’s a great bit of fun to share our journey with you all. If there are any topics you’d like us to discuss please let us know! Talk to you all soon!
