Plucky Survivors See Europe: The Pesky Details

If you’ve been following along in the process of planning a 10-week European road trip, I’m up to the part where I’ve completed the big stuff – the airfare, the car, the hotels, the sights I want to see, and the bulk of the itinerary.

I wish I could say that I was all done and ready to go get my jaunt on. But what I quickly found out is that there are approximately one million, seven hundred and eight three thousand, four hundred and six pesky little details to deal with first.

A lot of them were bureaucratic in nature.

I already had a passport, so I didn’t have to worry about getting a new one with a certain president’s face on it.

Currently there is no need to get a visa to travel to most of the countries I’m going to, however that is changing this fall when the EU is implementing a new thing called the European Travel Information and Authorization System, or EITAS. This will require you to apply online with your basic info and a scan of your passport and then pay a €20 fee. It’ll provide access to any Schengen Area country (which is most of them in Europe) and be good for three years.

The UK has already started their own version of this called the United Kingdom Electronic Travel Authorization or UK-ETA. It involves downloading an app; providing details, scans, and photos; and paying £20. After submitting, the app said it could take several business days to receive an approval, but I got mine less than an hour later. It is automatically linked to your passport and is good for two years.

Then there is Global Entry. If you’re not familiar, it’s like TSA Pre-Check (which I already have) only for coming into the United States from abroad. It’s designed to speed up the process of going through customs and immigration and is mostly used by people who travel overseas frequently, but I read that it can also be helpful for people who might have tight turnaround to transfer from an international flight to a domestic connection. When I come back to the States from Amsterdam to Atlanta, I only have a couple of hours before I jump on another plane to Savannah, so I wanted to do everything I could to make that as smooth as possible.

To get Global Entry, you need to fill out more forms, provide more scans, and pay more fees but you also need to go for an in-person interview so they can take your fingerprints and ask you about your sordid background. This can only be done at a Global Entry processing center in the state in which you reside and there is only one in the entire state of Georgia – at the Atlanta airport.

“No big deal,” I thought. I’ll schedule it on a Friday, drive up on Thursday, and stay the weekend just for fun. So, that’s what I did only then it got rescheduled because of the partial government shutdown that affecting things like TSA and Customs and Border Protection. That got resolved – or at least resolved enough for me to have the appointment – and to Atlanta I hied.

Most people do the drive in about four hours. I usually do it in about three-and-a-half and how that happens is between me, whatever god I pray to when I’m driving really fast, and the Georgia Highway Patrol. Let’s just say I-75 between Macon and Atlanta is often like a scene from “Mad Max” and I come ready to play.

This time it took six hours! Construction on I-16 between Savannah and Macon played a big part, but the bigger part was getting to Atlanta at rush hour with bumper-to-bumper traffic through Downtown. Waze directed me off the freeway into even worse street traffic and then tried to send me down a street by the hotel that was closed for construction. I basically had to go a few blocks further and loop back and that process took an hour. I was less than a quarter mile from the hotel and it took an HOUR to get there because of complete gridlock. Most of Midtown is ripped up as they redo the streets in advance of some big sports-ball game next year and it is a mess.

To add insult to injury, the Global Entry appointment the next day took roughly four minutes. “Is this your current address?” “Have you ever been arrested?” “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” “Put your fingers on the pad.” “Put your other fingers on the pad.” “I’m going to take a picture.” “Bye.”

Seriously, that was the whole thing.

Another pesky detail that had to be addressed was staying alive during the trip. Part of being a Plucky Survivor means surviving all the various crap that’s wrong with me and that involves taking a lot of different medications.

My insurance requires that I get a 90-day supply of my meds but the timing of my refills meant I would run out partway through the trip. Many, many calls to my insurance company, doctor, and pharmacy finally resulted in getting an override so I could get 120-days of them but as I write this, it still hasn’t been fully resolved.

I also had to get a doc from my doc called a “Letter of Medical Necessity,” stating that the suitcase full of drugs I’m going to be taking with me are for me and not to sell out of the back of the Plucky Mobile in Prague.

The bulk of the rest of the pesky details were solved by Amazon. This involved ordering things like a universal European plug adapter that would work in all 13 countries I’m visiting; a travel-sized clothes steamer and travel hangers; a theft-resistant backpack and cross-body bag, new luggage, and air tags to hopefully keep track of it all; packing cubes and compression bags; laundry detergent sheets so I can wash my delicates in the sink; and various other gadgets and doohickeys that sites like Travel + Leisure swear they don’t leave home without.

Now, I just need to fit all that stuff in the suitcases. We’ll talk about that in the next update.

Next: Packing Up My Anxiety