Even Seasoned Travelers Can Make a Wrong Turn

When we came into Paris from Kuala Lumpur, the stamp on our passports into the EU was so difficult to find we had to locate it by a process of elimination, and it had no expiration date. (Most visas tell you how many days you can stay.) The date was very hard to read and we never worried about it since we planned to move from country to country until our departure from Stockholm on September first, giving us a nice 156 days of travel in Europe. It seemed like we had up to six months to bop around Europe, so after 10 days in Paris, a month in Lisbon, almost another month in the south of France, a week on Corsica, we were on our way through Italy when we discovered the Schengen Agreement.
Can you read the dates? The actual stamps that altered our travel plans. (For all photos, click to enlarge.)Unless you've traveled extensively in Europe yourself, it's likely you've never heard of this annoying little treaty amongst most, but not all, EU countries, and a couple non-EU states. But what it is? In a nutshell, because of the open borders that now unites large swaths of Europe, the countries affected developed this agreement to allow passport-less travel, which is very nice for those countries' citizens. Except for one problem: The limitation for Americans is 90 days out of every 180 days and you can't just cross a border into a non-Schengen country to reset the clock. Once you've used your 90 days of travel in the agreement countries, your travel time is up until 180 days have elapsed.

Which brings us to the sudden realization we had in Trieste that after all our galavantin around, we only had a few days left and not even enough to spend at the one-week apartment (already booked) in Stockholm to fly out at the end on our British Airlines flight (also already booked). Thankfully, the airline can be changed and the apartment was our only firm booking. But what, in a moment of shocking arithmetic awareness, seemed so remote was about to impact everything else we were about to plan.
SchengenFest? This must be the festival of irony!Through sheer luck, we had planned to stay in Croatia, not a member of the agreement, for a month, and we had time to figure out how we were going to arrive in Stockholm. The path we'd planned was to go from Istanbul to the Czech Republic, through Poland, up through Germany, then into Sweden or Norway. But ALL of those countries are part of the agreement! So, like fugitives, we had to route around all the countries now part of this new wall of bureaucracy. Thankfully the clock stopped when we left Italy, giving us a few extra days once we entered into Croatia, and Turkey wasn't part of the new deal either.

But how to actually get home using our already-book flight out of Stockholm? As it turns out, because there has always been a long-standing agreement between Ireland and the UK because of something to do with both being islands, both countries opted out of Schengen, although very oddly we've read stories where unsuspecting backpackers were interrogated at Heathrow and elsewhere in the UK when it was discovered they had overstayed their Schengen limit, even though the UK is not a signatory to it. But the good news is the UK and Ireland are both outside the zone, which means we're now going to spend the bulk of our time on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, then Istanbul. We'll fly directly to Dublin from there, then to Glasgow, and finally leave out of London, which we were flying through from Stockholm anyway.
Most of the time we're like these kids on the Rijeka promenade: What's next?But for all the folks who want to backpack around Europe for an extended time (that is, longer than 90 days), you need to either get a special visa or plan parts of your trip to countries not part of the count-down timer of buzz kill.