Author: Rex Rountree

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Racing the Clock – Schengen Area

We screwed up and miscalculated our Schengen Area time limit, but caught our mistake just in the nick of time. 

You see, there is a rule in Europe, specifically in the countries making up the Schengen Area, which allows tourists to visit anywhere within the “area” for 90 days out of every 180 without a formal travel visa. Most travelers on vacation don’t run into any problems with this, but long-term travelers can if they are not careful. 

Source: Wikipedia

We had planned our time in Spain and Portugal with this in mind. We arrived in Madrid on September 2 and would be leaving Lisbon via cruise ship on November 27. This meant we would be in the Schengen Area for 87 days, 3 days under the limit. Everything was planned to line up perfectly. 

About 60 days into our trip it hit us. The “clock” stops only when your passport is stamped into a country outside the Schengen Area.  Because we are cruising out of the area and there is no exit stamp when you leave a country, we will be over our limit by about 11 days. Our passports would not be stamped until our cruise arrived in Brazil. By going over, we could face hefty fines or be denied reentry back into the area the next time we visit Europe.  That’s not good!  

So, what can we do?

We talked through about a dozen possible solutions and the quickest, easiest and least expensive option was to skip the time we were going to spend after the Camino touring southern Spain and Portugal and fly to a country outside the Schengen Area instead, thus buying back the days we need for the cruise. 

It’s a bit of a convoluted mess, but we’re flexible and open to new experiences. We spent a few hours researching and booking accommodations at our chosen destination and then let out a big sigh of relief knowing we’d avoided what could have been a huge problem for us when we planned to return to Europe next summer. 

We knew this nomadic lifestyle would come with challenges. Hopefully we successfully passed our first test!

Any guesses on where we are heading? 

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How do we stay secure while traveling the world?

Since we’ve had a few down days as we recover from some injuries, we thought we’d touch on a few security related topics and how we’re handling them as we travel. 

Keeping valuable personal data secure while traveling…

Before we left on our adventure, we purchased a Virtual Private Network (VPN) package for our phones and computer so we can securely connect to the internet regardless of the WiFi network (pronounced “Wee-Fee” in Spain) we are connected to. We still need to manage our personal banking as well as our travel business, and this has allowed us to do both without the worry of our sensitive information being stolen over insecure networks. It’s also allowed us to watch TV shows and movies on our streaming apps just as we would from home since the VPN connection makes it seem like we are connecting from the US. That’s been a nice bonus on several occasions when we’ve had a lot of down time to fill after the chores were done. 

What to do with all those receipts…

When at home, we always shred our credit card receipts once we no longer need them. Since Kara refused to carry the shredder in her pack, we’ve employed a different, but highly effective system. When we have a private hostel or hotel room, we fill the sink with water and soak all the accumulated receipts we no longer need for about an hour. Once thoroughly saturated, most of the ink will have bled out. We then take each receipt and basically make spit balls, squeezing as much water as possible out of each one. Then we place the cache of spit balls on the back of the sink or toilet to let them fully dry until it is time for us to check out. By this time, they have either dried into small rocks or would be so difficult to unroll, any would-be data thief would not be able to decipher the information within. Could a nation-state with unlimited resources be able to crack them?  Maybe.  But I’m pretty confident this is good enough for a couple of mild-manored world travelers to secure their latest purchases from prying eyes.

Being aware for emergency preparedness…

The Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) is a free service for U.S. citizens and nationals who are traveling or living abroad. STEP allows you to enter information about trips abroad so that the Department of State, via our embassies and consulates, can better assist you in an emergency. You can also subscribe to receive email updates with travel advisories and other information for a particular country. 

What are your travel tips/hacks to stay secure while traveling?  We’re always open to suggestions and would love to hear your ideas. 

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Day 1 – The day is finally here!  

The day is finally here!  We started our Camino today. The weather has been warm in Southwestern France lately, so everyone woke up before dawn to get a jump start to their destination before the heat of the day. After a carb-heavy breakfast of baguettes and croissants (very common in France) with 4 types of homemade jam from local fruit by our albergue host, Joe at Gitê Bidean, we started our journey. 

Sunrise over the Pyrenees
Met folks from Cali!

There are two possible stops for pilgrims leaving Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port (SJPP) – Orisson, which is 8 km (5 miles) up the French Pyrenees; or Roncesvalles, which is 25 km (15.5 miles) and gets you over the mountain in a single day. Since we have not been able to do any hill training in flat Indiana, we chose self preservation and stayed in Orisson tonight. 

The Camino showed us no mercy, starting to climb immediately upon leaving our albergue.  For most of the day, we followed the one lane road giving way to cars coming down the mountain.  There were a lot of pilgrims on the trail and they spread out on both sides of the road. I wasn’t sure if we should be walking on the left side so we could see the cars coming at us like we do in the US, or on the right side as many others were doing. I thought “maybe these people on the right are French and know the local rules better than I do” so I moved over to the right side. Shortly after I did, a car came down the hill and “aggressively” waved us back over to the left side. Ok, I guess we walk on the left here too. Lesson learned. 

Holy crap, the hills were calf burners for sure!  We expected the first two days to be hard, but these hills were steep. So steep I had to break out the Apple Measure tool from my “sh*t I don’t use” folder on my phone because I remembered it has a level built into it. My handy new level told me our climb today ranged between pitches of 7 and 13 degrees. Think about that the next time you set the elevation on a treadmill!  Our day’s elevation gain was just under 2k feet. About 20 minutes into our day, we were very happy with our decision not to go all the way to Roncesvalles in a single day! 

The mountains are absolutely stunning and made the climb much more tolerable.  There were sheep and cows grazing in pastures set against green rolling hills around every corner. This was absolutely the French countryside I was hoping for. We took every opportunity we could to stop and take pictures (and if our legs got to rest while we did, then I guess that was ok too). 

Restaurant with a view
Our dorm – slept 6

After “only” about 3 hours of climbing, we rounded a corner and saw our spot for the night. Hallelujah!  We stayed at Refuge Orisson.

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Trudging through the next few weeks…

We’ve been busy training for our Camino de Santiago trip. Every morning (almost), we get up, grab breakfast, coffee and tea and head out into our neighborhood carrying our full Camino packs and gear. The shakedowns are mostly done at this point, but conditioning is still needed for for the 562 miles (900km) to come. At this point, though, we are both bored out of our minds!  The same routes, the same streets, the same sidewalks and paths.  We’re over it!

Earlier this week, I told Kara I am ready for these walks to “count”.  I want to be on the actual trail making actual progress toward Santiago rather than waiting for our tracking app to tell us we’ve hit our mileage goal for the day. I want to be practicing my Spanish with albergue hosts and restaurant staff.  I just want to start already. We’re in the dog days of summer and training is all we can do.  Our plane doesn’t leave for a few more weeks, so we keep walking and walking and walking.  We’re gutting it out, but every day is “leg day” and it it has stopped being fun. 

We are as ready as we can be at this point.  We know the Pyrenees mountains the first couple days will kick our butts. But in glacier-flattened Indiana, the only hill training we can do is a set of stairs near an overpass by our house (we desperately miss the mountains of California). We plan to take it slow over the Pyrenees. There’s no need to go too fast too soon. Our plan is to push through the first two days and ask our bodies for forgiveness later.

We’re less than a month away from our start date. It can’t come soon enough.