Leaving Europe - Schengen Problems for Van Life

Good morning. We got a fairly early decent start this morning because today is a big day. We've got to leave. It's moving day but it's also border crossing day. One cool thing about the Schengen is, in the Schengen when you cross borders like from France to Italy, there's no border controls. It's just like going from state to state in the U.S. So that is one big plus about the Schengen, especially if you live in the Schengen zone. But if you're travelers like us, what that means is we only get 90 days in Schengen and then we gotta leave for 90 days. And guess what? We're out of time. We're out of time. We have to leave the Schengen zone and get out. So that is the order of business today. We are southbound on the beautiful coast of Croatia. We will be back here when the weather is warmer to swim in this beautiful blue water. But today is all about getting to Montenegro before we run out of time on our Schengen visa. Another country. Another country. Let's head to the border. As we're headed south towards the border to leave Croatia, a few things we have noticed about this country that we may or may not have told you over the past couple of videos because we've kind of been in a hurry to get down to this border. But one, they grow a lot of grapes here. There are vineyards everywhere and the farther south we got, the more and more we started seeing them all over the mountains. And the same goes for olives. They are everywhere. And I think it's because it seems like a very dry and arid climate through here. A lot of the shrubby things. Like you would almost expect to see some cactuses popping up. We have not. But it feels like that kind of climate. There are also campgrounds all along this coast. Everywhere. Seems like every little restaurant or every little empty lot on the coast, if it's not a hotel or a home, it is some sort of campground. The downfall is it's wintertime and they're all closed. So we are anxious to get back here. Not in the height of summer season, but maybe in the shoulder season. Maybe April or May-ish. And check out some of these beachfront campsites because they are all over the place in Croatia. It definitely is a van life atmosphere. We're just not getting to experience that right now because of the time of the year. And another little odd fact is as we drive along these roads, every few miles or kilometers, we see a street sign that is telling us to watch out for wild boar. Now we haven't seen them, but as many sides as we've seen, you'd think that there were just thousands of wild boar running through here. Now it would be nice to see one. Maybe not in the middle of the night when you disturb him and he gets angry. But you guys know we love wildlife and it's been a bit but since we've seen any. So maybe we'll get lucky and find some down in Montenegro. But just a few little things to tell y'all about Croatia as we're getting ready to leave. So we literally just drove you over the city of Dubrovnik. There's a road that runs along the mountainside here. We had a perfect bird's eye view of an incredibly beautiful city that is famous for many many reasons. One of them, for the Game of Thrones fans out there, this is where a lot of that show is filmed. And if you walk through here, they say a lot of it is going to look very familiar. Another thing is this area suffered a lot of damage during the war that happened in this region in the early 1990s. Yep. In the early 1990s. And they say from certain lookout points you can look over and see all of the signature orange roofs of the city. And the newer ones are the houses or buildings that were bombed in 91. Which is recent guys. That is a, as far as history goes, that's recent war times. I think the the hurricane, hurricane, I think the earthquake of 96 also got this area pretty good. And it is the city we wanted to see. So when we come back through we will figure out how to take you down there. There's supposed to be some beautiful churches, some nice fortresses, and a very famous wall. Because it was a walled city that you can walk around. Now back in ancient times it was a heavy trade route destination and was kind of its own country, its own empire for a while. Kind of like Venice was over in Italy. But over time it became part of Croatia. And it is a city we'll take you to in the future. But I couldn't help but show you just how beautiful it is from this mountain road. And just a quick update. We're south of Dubrovnik and only about 30 minutes away from the Montenegro border. Now we've been coming along this coastline and I'm telling you it is cliff sides. There are places it you know it's steep and you go up and down and you have some stunning views. This coastline is as beautiful as any as we've seen. And I feel like the further south you get the more beautiful it is. We are gonna miss Croatia and we're gonna miss the Schengen countries. But we're getting close to the border guys. As we get closer to the border I'm going to turn my attention to a few things you would need to know if you were going to cross a border in a car or a van from Croatia to Montenegro. Now first of all I want to back up a little bit. And when we decided to ship the van over to Europe I had to research things like insurance for the van. All of the countries over here require that we carry liability insurance on the van just like most countries in Central and South America did. But over here most of the countries share an insurance kind of program and you buy it through there's numerous different insurance companies just like in the states. But it's called the green card and it will cover almost every country in all of Europe. Now because of the Ukraine war and because our vehicle is registered in a non-EU or non-Schengen country they eliminate some of those countries from our coverage. So we have a green card insurance policy that covers most of Europe but because our van is from the United States it does not cover any of these Balkan countries. It does cover Croatia but once we leave here we're going to have to stop at each border and pick up car insurance. But that's okay because we're used to that from Central and South America. So that is going to be one of the things we have to deal with at this border. And if you're from Europe it might would have been something that would have confused you so I wanted to explain to you why our green card does not cover us over here. Four minutes from the border crossing leaving Croatia and entering Montenegro. My border butterflies are kicking in. I just cannot help it. I've got all our documents gathered up originals and copies. Let's go do this. It's 11 15 and we've made it to the border. There is a bit of a line. Now this is our first formal border crossing in Europe. In Central and South America you would just go over on the wrong side of the road and pass all the semis. Doesn't look like that's what happens here. Right up here it looks like they divide the semis and the cars. So we have to wait in line. There's generally a two-step process. We're at the Croatian side meaning we got to check out of Croatia and then we'll head up a little bit further before we have to check into Montenegro. Now over in Latin America or in all of the Americas the app that people like us overlanders use is iOverlander. It is the predominantly used one and it is populated with all kinds of information. Here in Europe the main one that is used is called Park4Night. Now we've finally gotten used to it and figured out all the ins and outs and it is a good tool for finding campsites and things like that. But there's a big difference between iOverlander and Park4Night. iOverlander will have places where people can enter their experiences and stuff that happened at border crossings and at checkpoints and at embassies and for dealing with pets and also for dealing with having to get car insurance and stuff like that. Park4Night has none of that. So our resource that we're very very used to from Latin America is gone. So we believe we know everything we need for this border but we don't really have a tool to check. Also wikiOverlander. We use wikiOverlander which is a great online site for a lot of countries. Nothing for this border. Yeah so we've read some google reviews. iOverlander is used here but it is just not populated very much at all. So there's very scarce data. So I kind of feel like we're going into this border blind Kurt. In typical Kurt fashion a line waiting queuing up absolutely kills him. So he's going exploring. He's walking up there to see what's up. See if we actually do need to wait in this line or not. His persistence pays off sometimes and gets us around some of these lines. Me I'd just sit here until everybody moved out of the way. It's a pretty good blending between me and Kurt when we work together on these kind of things. All right my invest... all right my investigatory nature paid off. We were actually supposed to go around the trucks. Trucks go through customs. We do not and so we are in line now to get stamped out. So in the scheme of things we probably waited there for 10 minutes. It's 11 24 and so we're moving through. We are out of Croatia. We are officially out of Croatia. The van and us we pulled up to the gate. Our license plate which is a Florida United States license plate got a lot of attention. Kurt was socializing with some of the Croatian border police and I didn't even have to get out. I was able to do everything through the nice customs guide here at the window. He stamped our passports out so we are officially out of the Schengen which is very important. We need that documented. They checked our car papers. Here it seems like we don't have to get an official document for our van. Maybe they just enter them into a computer system or something. He checked over all of our documents for the van so it was easy peasy. At the gate we were probably sitting there at the little immigration booth for four or five minutes tops. Now we have to drive a little ways till we get to the Montenegro border where the check-in of course will be a little bit more thorough because we're entering a country instead of just leaving one. So a couple of things when we were waiting for our turn to leave at the Croatia border. We noticed that the cars coming into Croatia which would be entering the EU, entering the Schengen. It looked like a much more formalized process. Cars were getting searched. People were having to pull their suitcases out and they were getting gone through. So when we come back I believe it'll be a bit more complex when we enter the EU again. All right time to focus. We're at the Montenegro border and there's a line that looks like a dozen cars or so. It doesn't look like we have to hop out. It looks like we go through the booths. We're gonna have to buy car insurance here which I believe we can do right here at one of these booths just past the border. That's what we hope anyway. So y'all keep your fingers crossed. We had to come in off the off the uh off to the right into this building and up the stairs and to get the audio insurance auto insurance. It was pretty easy. It was 28 dollars, 28 euros I should say for 30 days. It took all of about five or ten minutes. They took our paperwork. They held our passports there until we got the insurance. So we're headed back there to get our passports and I believe we should be done now. So let's go do that and see how things work out. Well I had to wait for a van load of like 12 people but gave them showed in the paperwork it was really quick. 12 o'clock so right about it in 45 minutes. No 45 minutes. We are officially in Montenegro which is our 20th country in the van which means it's the 20th country for the kitty cats. Now for me and Kurt for total travels it is our 31st country but who's counting. Hello Montenegro. Now we do not have to worry about exchanging money because Montenegro uses the euro which we already have some of. But we do need fuel and it's a 158. We rolled the dice uh it was only a dollar or euro I think 47. But this is also the border station. It might be cheaper as we get closer to town. We were hoping Montenegro was cheaper. Yeah we rolled the dice we'll see. We have about a half a tank. We'll let you know what fuel costs are here as we move forward down the road. But we got all the things we need to do. We're in a new country so. Yeah and I don't think either one of us have to deal with sim cards. I think my sim card well it's already working here. We'll know soon if Kurt's is going to kick in and automatically work. So sim cards are definitely easier to deal with here in Europe. So all we really had to do different there was card documents and get some insurance. I'm excited new country. So we went a couple of miles into Montenegro away from the border and we found diesel for $1.41. It's just a couple of cents per liter but we did make the right gamble. It is a little bit cheaper here in Montenegro. Not much. Six cents per liter cheaper. We'll take all we can get. So when you cross a border grocery stores change, gas stations change, roadsides change, the names of things. Everything just kind of changes instantly. Now in Montenegro officially they speak Montenegrin but that is not an official language in the google translate. So other official languages here are Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. And I actually think all of these former Yugoslavia countries have very similar languages. Maybe with just different accents or a few different slang words. A few minor differences but I think if you can speak one you can probably get by in all these countries. Unfortunately we don't speak any of those do we Kurt? No but they spoke pretty good English at the gas station. So we veered off the main road to kind of get a feel for Montenegro when we first got here and mainly to see the water's edge. And uh well it's kind of like veering off the main road in Croatia. It's tight. Oh boy. Here we go. Watch this wall. Oh Jesus. Oh guys. You got it. About six inches. And this is a wall over here not just bushes on the bottom half. We made it back to the main road. How are you doing Kurt? Doing good. He doesn't bother Kurt. My hands are so slippery from sweat I'm about to drop the camera. All right let's see where we can find for camping guys. So as soon as we crossed the border we were pretty much in a city. And as we drove through the city it is obvious that it is a tourist destination mixed in with probably just a typical city with a lot of banking and industry and stuff like that. But it sits on this beautiful bay and there are hotels and there's a beach that lines the whole way. But it is crowded and the name of it is let's see Herceg Novi. H-E-R-C-E-G-N-O-V-I. And it looks like a lovely little city if you travel by staying in hotels and that type of thing. In a van it looks like somewhere we need to get out of right Kurt? 100%. Don't worry we're going to continue to follow this blue water and hopefully get out of this area that's so super crowded and populated. Maybe get into a little bit of nature. When we first crossed the border there was a big sign that basically said no wild camping. And we've read that just finding little nooks and crannies to camp it's not going to be super easy in Montenegro. We just pulled in just to take a look at the water. It's the first place we've been able to pull over and see it. First thing you see big giant sign no campers anytime. But technically most times when countries say no camping they mean don't roll out your awning, don't get out your grill, don't sit chairs outside. So for us if we can find a little paid parking lot or a little private parking lot by a restaurant that will let us stay along this water that should be no problem. We just can't set up camp you know and we can just stay in our van and not really disturb people around us. So challenge number one in Montenegro is going to be finding somewhere to camp. Here's a ferry where you can get to the other side rather quickly. Part of our journey through here we'll be driving all around this beautiful bay. So for right now no ferry ride for us. But it looks like there are several ferries and they just go back and forth all the time. And now we've gotten to a little bit of a narrow stretch through here. I'm glad Kurt's driving right now. Ever since we got to the coastline of this bay there have been people, activity, hustle and bustle, stores, people coming and going, people crossing the roads. There are sailboats and normal boats out on the water. It may be wintertime but there's activity here isn't there Kurt? A lot more activity than there was up north in Croatia. I don't know if it's because it's a Saturday or if this is just more like a resort-y type place where there's a bunch of people here on holiday. But a lot more people around for sure. All right our first real option, we've been keeping an eye out, but our first real option that we had hoped we'd be able to camp, there's this parking lot that's right across the street from a little private beach. But as you can see it's closed up tight. So option number one is a no-go. We've got option number two plugged into Kurt's phone. The beach is closed. This has proven to be quite difficult guys. Now just so you know there are several campsites all around this beautiful bay but most of them are, well all of them, all of them that we could find, we reached out to, we emailed, we messaged, we searched them down on Facebook. They're all closed until April 1st. There was one that used to be open year-round and it permanently closed about two months ago. So and everywhere you look there's those no camping anytime signs. Maybe spot number two will bring better luck. Spot number two looks like it's gonna work out just fine. Look at this view guys from our camp where we're gonna stay. Looks like some sort of a marina parking lot in a small town. But look at this beautiful, beautiful bay of Kotor. Vanna seems very happy up on the dash getting her some vitamin D. We are wore out. The border crossings always do that to us but we're home sweet home. Now we got lucky and we got us a little informal coffee shop right here. We're gonna walk over there and see if we can get us a cup of coffee. You'll be famous. Cheers. American dream. Oh so this right here is the coffee? All right what a fun place. I just met Dragon in here and we got some Turkish coffee. Yeah and so they put like a little bit of water in and then it boiled up and it expanded. I don't think I got the full video of it. She was a bit nervous but well the key to apparently from what I googled so if the google is right with Turkish coffee is there's no filter. So it's very finely ground coffee and they put it in here and they do their boil technique which is a little bit different but there's no filter so down towards the bottom of this it should get thicker and syrupy. So here we go. Yeah let's see. Oh it's good. It has a distinct flavor to it. It's good. I like it. And they brought us some little snacks too. Yes they did. What a cool little spot here. We got the van in the back. We got I think this is like a bay. It's the bay of Kotor. The bay of Kotor right here. Sun's gonna be going down in front of us. Turkish coffee. Nice people. Wow guys. First night. Hopefully it goes well but so far perfect. We'll see on the next one guys. See you in a few days. Cheers. Cheers. If you like this video be sure to subscribe to our channel and hit that notification bell so you guys know when we put out new videos. And don't forget you can always follow us over on Instagram to see what's going on in between videos. Cheers guys.