Our first winter since 2011 and The Schengen Zone

Home to beautiful Vancouver

We headed to the ranch in Kamloops to pick up the truck which started on the first try again this year. We had some heavy winds this last year so the guys had to put a few new shingles back on the barn.

Welcoming Bryan and Denise to their new home in Kamloops

A little moto action on the first weekend home!

Some Holiday celebrations

Kite surfing in La Ventana

A 50 th Birthday in Hawaii

Well we are back on the road this week. Flying to Madrid April 7, 2016 and then traveling about 200 km south to get the bikes out of their winter storage in our friend Modesto’s garage. We have some maintenance to do including oil changes, some upgrades to the crash bar hardware, new chains and sprockets, install new headlights and rewire bike lighting, install voltage meters, install new wire harness for the 650, and remove the “tool tubes”.

We are also headed back to the Schengen Zone. WTF is the Schengen Zone you may ask? Well so did we. I have polled a lot of North Americans and none knew what it was or what the implications are for non-Schengen residents.

We arrived last year to Madrid on March 1 and our passports were stamped “ Espania in by air”. When we picked up our bikes at the cargo terminal we signed a waver that we would take the bikes out of Spain in the next 6 months. Just like Argentina….. NOT

We travelled in Morocco March 25 to April 18 and were stamped out and into “Espania by boat”.

We then travelled to the UK May 4, where out passport stamp said “Leave to enter for six months, Employment and recourse to public funds prohibited”.

We entered the Netherlands “by boat” June 9. By now we had been in the “unknown Schengen Zone for 6 weeks. It was after we were in the middle of the north sea June 17 when we were telling our new Greek friends about out trip, when one of them asked “what are you doing about the Schengen problem”? We were like “Schenzen???” It was 2 days until we had internet to investigate this problem.

We as Canadians (Non-Schengen Zone residents) are allowed only 90 days in the SZ and then must be out for 180 days before you can reenter legally. So by this calculation we were have way to becoming illegal aliens in the SZ! The penalty is deportation and being barred from the SZ in future!

So Far all the countries we have been in from March 1 only the weeks we spent in Morocco and the UK are outside of the SZ. To add to this we will be inside the zone until we try to get to Russia for 3 days in August and then until the end of October.

Luckily for us scanning your passport at the SZ checks does not calculate your days inside the zone. We did have to pass thru SZ border checks at the ferry port on the way to and from St Petersburg. This was quite stressful on our way back from Russia after our 72 hour Visa Free, as we did not have a Russian visa to stay there and we were technically illegal in the SZ. Luckily the official asked me when I came to the SZ (when i arrived to Holland June 9) and not when did you first come to the SZ (March 1).

This still left the problem of getting out of Madrid at the end of October. We had been mostly in the SZ for the last 8 months. I think the fact that we are Canadian and flying home made it a lot easier. They did not even ask us any questions at the SZ passport control and just stamped us “out of Espania” by plane! This year we will have less of an issue as we are in the zone for April 7 to June 30 but out for much of the rest of the summer in the Adriatic Countries before we leave the bikes in ? Bulgaria.