Shakeout Ride and Updates

 Preparations are in full swing and we just completed a 3-day / 2-night shakeout ride.  Video there:  https://youtu.be/6etcLq7uY7M

This was the last test ride we will do and it went really well.  We have a short list of things to change but overall, we feel good about being ready.

Visas have also been the topic of a lot of concern for us.  All of the European countries we plan to visit are party to a visa agreement called the Schengen agreement.  The agreement states that an American traveling in the Schengen zone automatically receives a Schengen visa upon arrival.  However, the Schengen visa only allows you to stay in the Schengen zone for 90 days in any 180 period.  Since our trip is planned to be about 160 days, that would mean that we would need to spend 70 days of our trip outside the Schengen zone.  There were two workarounds I was looking into.  The first is to simply plan to be outside the Schengen zone for the 70 days.  The challenge is that there aren't that many countries that are options and there seemed to be two realistic options:  The UK and Ireland or the balkan countries on the Adriatic sea, particularly Croatia.  The second workaround is to try to get a bilateral visa from one country that would take effect separate from the Schengen visa.  Every country has long term resident visas that are available but we don't quality for those.  France has a long term visitor visa that looked like it may work for us so we started down that path to fill out visa applications for Annalee and the girls.

But we received some great news that solved the issue for us.  After contacting the EU to confirm if Annalee and the girls even need visas to travel with me, an Irish citizen, we finally heard back.  Because I am an Irish citizen, the entire family can travel throughout most countries in Europe without visas as long as we don't stay in any one country longer than 90 days.  This is a big relief and makes me thankful I got my Irish citizenship 20 years ago!

With that confirmation, we've been able to come up with a plan we are very excited about that you can see here.