How to do the Schengen Shuffle

Post-Brexit rules mean British travellers need to plan carefully if they want to spend months exploring key parts of Europe. Sally Howard reveals how to create a Grand Tour for our times

How’s your wanderlust? According to a recent poll by GlobalData, those of us lucky enough to live in countries with high vaccination rates are emerging from lockdowns with a hunger for once-in-a-lifetime trips. This is partly down to increased bureaucracy borne of Brexit and the pandemic (all those tests to be booked, regulations to be appraised of and travel insurance to secure). It’s also, of course, down to 18 months of pent-up wanderlust. If you’re going to jump the hurdles of travel planning in 2021, why not think big and go beyond the usual tourist haunts?

Of course, new rules brought in post-Brexit dictate that UK citizens are now subject to the Schengen Area’s visa-waiver stay limitation. This means you can only stay within the Schengen Area (which comprises the bulk of western Europe) for 90 days out of every 180 – but with a spot of clever maths (and the odd dip in and out of the zone via a bit of canny planning), you too can become a so-called “Schengen shuffler”, and get your extended travel plans back on track.

Videographer Holly Brega and her partner Mike, both 30 and from Suffolk, are planning to spend a year travelling across Europe in their van “Brienne” – another feature of a pandemic travel landscape in which transit through airports holds less of an appeal. Leaving later this month, a year-long adventure will take the couple across France and into Spain for 60 days of their 90-day Schengen zone allocation and then into Morocco – a trip that is set to become a favoured route for “snowbirds”, or retired British travellers seeking winter sun. British passport holders are afforded a visa-free stay for 90 days on arrival in Morocco, which Schengen shufflers have coined a “clock reset”.

“Mike and I were both furloughed and did the van up ourselves,” explained Brega, who also spent her furlough caring for her terminally ill father, who passed away last year. “We knew we wanted to spend a year travelling around Europe, but Brexit changed our plans, so we’ve had to adapt our itinerary in order to spend roughly three months in Schengen and three months out of the zone.” The couple will work on organic farms across Morocco (WWOOFing with Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms) to get to know the culture before heading to beach favourite Essaouira and taking a guided hike up North Africa’s highest peak, the snow-dusted Mount Toubkal. “We’d planned to go away before Covid, but that and my dad’s health detained us – now we’re chomping at the bit,” Brega told me.

Carole Evans, of the Caravan and Motorhome Club, welcomes the boom. “One reason for their [motorhoming and caravanning] appeal is that it’s more spacious and airy to travel on ferries, or within your own car on Eurotunnel, than it is on planes,” she said, adding that the club’s members are reporting that the ferry and Eurotunnel ports are generally running smoothly, without the lengthy queues reported at some UK airports.

Many of the new grand tourists – who discuss travel routes on forums such as the Facebook group VanLife-UK (facebook.com/groups/vanlife.uk) and outandaboutlive.co.uk – aspire to lengthier immersion in the culture and lifestyle of the countries they’re travelling through: considered slow travel rather than a traditional sunshine fly-and-flop.

“Fast wheels do not uncover a country’s beauty,” Myles Davies, 53, told me, who with wife Karen, 54, blogs about European motorhome travels as the “motoroamers”. “It’s only through travelling slowly you get an essence of any place, and of yourself in relation to it.”

It’s a form of big-canvas travel, says Dr Sarah Goldsmith, author of Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour, which calls to mind aristocrats on the original Grand Tours, embarking on lengthy journeys through Belgium, Switzerland, Geneva, Italy and German-speaking northern Europe. They learned to fence, studied ancient ruins and appreciated and collected renaissance art en route.

“The Grand Tourists also travelled slowly, taking all of their possessions with them, including bathtubs and crates of British tea,” Goldsmith revealed. “Historian and MP Edward Gibbon even travelled with his own bookcase!” Goldsmith notes that post-Brexit and Covid travel bureaucracy is not a patch on the travel admin faced by the 18th-century aristos. “In an era where wars were erupting and borders rapidly shifting, you could enter one country and find that you were in another country entirely the next day. And many cities required permits for outsiders to enter, let alone countries.”

Rupert Dillow, 30, a solicitor who’s written an ebook on navigating the new Schengen travel regulations and who plans to embark on a Grand Tour with girlfriend Emma Downey, 33, in their van “Minnie” later this year, says the planning complexities ushered in by Brexit and Covid could inspire Britons to tackle more ambitious itineraries, including countries that are little-visited.

“Croatia has a wonderful coastline and is becoming the go-to for Schengen shufflers,” he said. “Albania is also cheap and friendly… and Romania is the last unspoilt wilderness in Europe. It’s great these places have a chance to shine.”

So what exactly does a new Grand Tour around Schengen look like? Here are a few ideas.