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. 

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?