Schengen, What?
After our double cross-country trip in the United States, Kimberly and I settled in and agreed to a “three bears approach” to planning the rest of our trip. Not too much where every moment was planned, and not too little where we woke up and didn’t know where we were sleeping that evening. For Europe, the extent of our entry/exit/visa planning was as follows:
- Visited Travel.State.Gov
- Individually entered the names of the countries we planned to visit.
- Read, “You may enter [name of country] for up to 90 days for tourist and business purposes without a visa.”
- Considered ourselves complete with entry/exit/visa planning.
Before arriving, we already had our flight to South Africa so we knew that we would be in Europe for 105 days but never in one country for more than a few weeks…definitely under the "90-day-per" limit. It wasn’t until Iceland when we had the following conversation with the border police and discovered we should’ve researched a little bit more:
Image from: http://www.differencebetween.net/
Border Police: “How long are you in Iceland?”
Us: “Ten days”
Border Police: “How long are you in Europe?”
Us: “About three months.”
Border Police: “Without a visa, you’re not allowed in the Schengen Area for more than 90 days”
Us: “Ok, got it”
Border Police: [stamp] [stamp]
We immediately connected to WiFi to understand what "Schengen" meant. We learned that in the 1980’s, the countries of the European Union were trying to determine a way for its citizens to travel freely without borders (similar to how we as Americans can move from state to state with no border checks.) After many discussions, the Member States could not reach an agreement so France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands decided to create a territory of their own without internal borders. This became known as the "Schengen Area" after the town in Luxembourg where the first agreements were signed. Later on, other countries jumped on board with the idea and now 26 European countries are part of the Schengen Area.
As Americans, you can visit the Schengen Area with no visa for 90 days (not each individual country but the Area comprised of the participating countries) within a 180 day period. Enforcement of the Area depends on which country you’re in and has increased given the elevated activity of Europe's asylum-seeking refugees. There are stories online of [southern] countries such as Spain not batting an eye if you’ve overstayed your visit by months or even a year juxtaposed against [northern] countries like Germany fining, imprisoning, or even stamping passports with “Illegal Immigrant” after over-staying just a few days.
Our situation was not extreme but we wanted to err on the side of caution to avoid embarrassing international incidents. With 105 days of greater Europe planned, we simply needed to leave the Schengen Area for more than 15 days and make sure we got entry and exit stamps when we did. Two countries we were interested in, United Kingdom and Croatia are not part of the Schengen Area so we simply divided the 15 days between the two to keep our Schengen Area day count under 90. As we post this from Split, Croatia, we're not here just for the splendid sapphire waters but for the Schengen legitimacy as an added bonus.