Living on Schengen time has a couple meanings to us; I should write a song with that title. Traveling and living abroad requires patience most Americans do not possess. Since we have been traveling, we have gained some, but still not always enough. In some countries the motto is: why do today, what you can leave until tomorrow. Couple this with the tight visa limit in the Schengen countries. Spain is known as the country of “Come Back Tomorrow”. We now know why.
Nomad lifestyle challenges have been plenty lately. I will put them in separate posts, just know, we have been bombarded with @%&*# lately. As usual we are learning as we go and want to impart our knowledge to help the next people facing each hurdle. First the medical emergency, hospital stay. Then because of this “change of plans”, we are running out of schengen time and need to appeal to the government of Spain to get an extension.
The schengen Visa
What is “Schengen Time”? The name “Schengen” comes from the small winemaking town and commune of Schengen in far southeastern Luxembourg, where France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed the Schengen Agreement. This agreement or treaty has since expanded to where 26 European countries abolished their internal borders, for the free movement. It includes most but not all EU countries, and also some others. For example Switzerland is in Schengen, not in the EU. Ireland is in EU, but not in Schengen.
As Americans, and citizens of many countries, we do not need a traditional visa to enter a country in the Schengen zone anymore. However, this is good news/bad news. We can enter the Schengen zone without a visa and stay for 90 days in a 180 day consecutive stretch. This is a rolling total. You can come and go, but cannot accumulate more than 90 days in Schengen in the past 180 days. To help you keep track of how many schengen days you have, there are several online tools, each with a different visual. Find one you can follow. I like https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/visa-calculator/.
In the old days, you could go to France for 90 days, Spain for 90 and Italy for 90 days. Obtaining the needed visa was not much more than a little paperwork. Now zero paperwork, but 90 days in all the consolidated Schengen countries adds up real quick.
Fold in house sitting for months at a time, and we exhaust our Schengen time easily. It is getting to where we cannot be tourists in Europe, because all our time is used up dog sitting. This is a major impetus for obtaining residency in Portugal. Another topic that will be addressed soon.
Extending our Schengen Visa
Every country has a plan in place in case travelers or other legal aliens unexpectedly require a stay longer than the visa allows. We had a lot of experience with this in New Zealand during the first year and a half of Covid when borders were closed. Our visas were extended several times, allowing us to legally stay for 18 months.
We committed to more than three months of house sitting in Portugal and Spain this year, with a month in between the commitments. During that stretch, we went to the UK. We still did not have the 90 days clear, but we planned for this hurdle. The Spain homeowners actually returned in the middle of their vacation to cover for us for a week. During that time, we were planning to bug out to Gibraltar. Being a UK territory, Gibraltar is out of the Schengen, and less than an hour away. We had it all figured out.
Then the unexpected happened. Major health scare involving surgery. More on that here. Flying is prohibited for 5 weeks after surgery. No time left on the visa, so we needed to extend on medical grounds. It should be doable. Online searches yielded information that Spain would allow the extension for medical reasons, if we filled out the right paperwork and sent it to the correct agency. We found this direction over and over. But guess what? Never was the “right paperwork” available, linked, or even identified. And nowhere was the “correct agency” ever named. Somehow one of us figured out where to go (not me, so I don’t know how). He was able to get an appointment for one of us on 24 December, midday. We thought this was a good time, people would be charitable… or impatient, either may work to our advantage. Our last day under our visa was 28 December. There was not another appointment, for the other one of us, until 30 December. We are hoping that they will handle both visas at the first appointment.
Come Back Tomorrow
One of our friends here asked one of her bilingual employees to accompany us to the meeting on the 24th. We did not think that would be necessary, but we appreciated the help. It turned out to be raining about an inch an hour that day. This poor man, after the 2 hours driving with us to this appointment, had another 5 hour drive to get to his family for Christmas. We arrive at the appointment to a locked door. Went around to another department of the National Police to be told, the visa office was closed today. It was a mistake to give us that appointment. We go home, in the downpour, empty handed and plan to do it again, sans the appointment on Monday. It is clear now, we need a translator. This is not going to be simple.
Monday 27, December. Visas expire tomorrow. We leave before it gets light to arrive at the visa office when they open. About 40 people also had that idea. We were not the only people who had an appointment on Christmas Eve. Oh, and it is raining again. We are waiting outside for them to figure out what to do with us. Also, we are told, each of us needs an appointment, we only have one. We still think we can get both done at the same time, in reality neither of us have an appointment today.
Finally wa are admitted to the office. After not much time, we are told we are in the wrong place for what we want to do. They extend visas, not Schengen non-visas. We are not arguing with these people, but we are pretty certain we made our original appointment at the right place. There was a pulldown option for extending schengen non-visas. That cannot be anything else, then what we need. We are sent to the office of the National Police where we were on Christmas Eve.
They tell us the person that deals with those things, called in sick. But if we wait until noon the person with the second shift will arrive. Or we can come back tomorrow. We wait. At noon, we come back to be told that he is still not there and may be later. He offers that we can go to the border where they have been known to handle emergency Visa issues there. Or we can come back tomorrow.
We walk about 20 minutes to the Gibraltar/Spain border and go to the immigration office. Wrong again, we are diverted to another office of the National Police on the frontier (border). We wait. The nice policeman there printed some forms for us to fill in. We already had the forms and already had them filled them in. However, he says they are not the people to receive the forms. They will take them and send them to Cadiz (another town). We say great. But we need proof, something like a copy stamped “received”. They do not have this stamp.
So back to the other National Police office; hopefully that guy is there now. He is not. The policeman at the window is persuaded by our bilingual translator to call him or something. We hear again that we can mail our forms to Cadiz. But we want a record that we have done so. A stamp or something. We only need about 2 weeks extension. There is a pretty good chance that the visa extension will not be processed before this, so the stamped copy of the submission is very important.
Eventually we are sent back to the visa office where we started the day. There is a lot of animated talking by these people (who remember these Americans from this morning), and our translator. I am sure “come back tomorrow” is part of the dialogue. Our translator has been the poster boy for patience and diplomacy, but even he is getting tired by now. It is about 2pm, we have been at this 6 hours. Finally we are led into the building, up some stairs, around some offices.
And voila, we sit down with a person that knows exactly what to do. He looks at our forms, and the back up information we have compiled and processes everything. We have compiled everything we can think of: doctors notes and a letter from him that I cannot fly, proof that all our previous medical attention has been paid; a copy of my next doctor’s appointment; a copy of our now canceled plane tickets as proof that we were planning to leave; a copy of our medical insurance policies; a copy of our bank statements to show we are financially stable.
Turns out we were missing something: they want a marriage license. Mark finds a picture of ours in our photo storage. After several attempts with our poor cell data limits, we get this picture downloaded and printed. Packages are compiled and… Yes, this guy has the stamp.
Just one thing. The form we filled out asked for our address. We know we are aliens and they want to know where we are. No problem, we fill in the address where we are staying. It is a place name, not a street number. Not common in the USA, but this is very common over here. This place is Cortijo el Aguila. It comes up in google maps, it is a legitimate address. But no mail is delivered there. It turns out, the visa extension is to be mailed. We do not have any other information. I even thought of giving them the address of the hospital. Finally the translator offers to use his sister’s address. So that is where our visa will go. Whew!
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