“But do you actually feel safe going on a wine tour?” I asked Todd as we tried to plan our upcoming, involuntary road trip. Our route would take us through France and we decided to spend 2 nights in Dijon, where we would meet a good friend from Paris. We hadn’t seen her in ages which was odd, even when we lived in different countries. We missed contact with other humans and meals away from home and we wanted to try to enjoy this forced trip. We also didn’t want to die.
With our Spanish residency visa expired, our trip to the US cancelled and our tourist visa in the UK expiring soon, we needed a plan. The only long term place we could legally be was the US and that was a hard no. The US was out of control with Coronavirus cases and our health insurance covered us in every country except the US. We were only returning there to renew our Spanish visas, so getting stuck, without US health coverage, with borders around the world closed to us once we stepped foot in the country, was not something we wanted to ponder. Todd and I decided that we were going to spend alternating 90-day stints (the limit for tourist visas) in Schengen and non-Schengen countries. Given that our summer in the UK so far had resembled fall in Seattle, we were determined to go as far south as possible, to catch what was left of summer. Given my baseless intuition that Todd and I would die on a boat, our Greek locale could not be too far by ferry. Paros it was!
I reached out to every home I wanted to stay at on Paros. $10k, $12k, $18k per month? Hadn’t they heard about this little virus going around? The one that was keeping everyone at home and decimating tourism and the economy? I sent out an email to any property I found suitable and offered to pay a generous (for the region) price based on long-term local rates. My theory is that this should be win-win for us. The Airbnb hosts got to fill their home with respectful guests with no vacancy while we didn’t have to go bankrupt to live in a suitable home. One gentleman explained that he and his wife would be in residence during September and October, but we could stay with them. Another hard no. Finally we found a home for a reasonable price, on neighboring island Naxos with gorgeous views, on an isolated beach. Perfect!
As Todd and I planned our driving route via Google maps, we were necessarily taken through the Balkans. Due to Covid, Greece would only have one land border open for non-essential travel at Promachonus, on the border with Bulgaria. What a pain, but it was a preferable route anyhow. We necessarily chose the longer route through Hungary and Romania because neither our auto insurance, nor our cell phone plan covered us in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia or Kosovo. Additionally, there was some civil unrest in some of these areas and Covid cases were tracking upwards in many of these countries.
Planning our route, we religiously consulted what had become our Covid travel bible: https://reopen.europa.eu. Despite traveling on US passports and Americans being persona-non-grata in the EU, we felt confident about our ability to enter France. Given our lack of a UK entry stamp (we scanned in when we arrived in the previous pre-Covid world), I would come armed with loads of documentation showing we had been in the UK for 6 months now. Indeed, we had not been to the US in years. The fact that we now owned a car, registered in the UK and were traveling with a dog also would convey a story of permanency. We didn’t just fly in with these things.
Things got a little dicey at the German border. They wanted a negative Covid test, no older than 48 hours old. But the UK was only offering tests to people showing symptoms. And results arrived 48 to 72 hours after the test. Would this delay invalidate the results? Would they let us in just to drive through? Would they send us away, left with a longer drive and stricter regulations from Switzerland and Austria? The answers just weren’t clear and Americans weren’t supposed to even be in these countries at all.
The final nail in the coffin and the one item that made all of the Germany, Switzerland, Austria considerations a moot point was Greece. They were requiring a negative test, no older than 72 hours for border entry. The non-stop drive to Promachonus was 28 hours in itself! How could we do this?
Being a nomad has some perks in that you tend to accumulate friends and acquaintances around the world. We figured we could reach out to people we knew in Budapest or Bucharest, have them help us navigate the health system, get tested and be on our way. However, our friend in Romania told us, “Don’t come here. The system is backed up for months. The authorities are taking children from infected parents. It’s out of control here.” She kindly reached out to someone in Bulgaria to see if the situation on the ground was any better there. The answer was a resounding no.
Todd and I could not risk getting to the Greek border and being turned away. I reached out to our airbnb host and asked for a refund. I explained that we just couldn’t get the tests to be allowed entry. We needed a new plan. What about Italy? Sicily was as far south as you could get. I started reaching out to hosts in Sicily. Todd and I could only shake our heads as our Greece plan had instantaneously become an Italy plan.
Finally at the end of the day, our Naxos host replied to my refund request. “Ok, but why would you go through the Balkans? Just take the ferry from Italy,” she advised. “Only people coming in from the Balkans need the negative test.”
Wait, what? There’s a ferry from Italy? This solved all of our problems! We could enter France, no problem, drive through Italy, no problem and enter Greece with a simple declaration that we were healthy and had not been in any Covid hotspots. Naxos was back on albeit with a 16 hour ferry ride and a sincere hope that my baseless intuition of our peril on the seas was nothing more than a scary story I had created in my mind somewhere along the way.