This is not a drill!

Well, it finally happened. Portugal has called our bluff…

When we applied for our D7 visa on December 11th in our nation’s capital, there were still enough administrative gates that we had to get through that living in Portugal was still feeling a bit hypothetical. Even our recent trip to check out our new digs in SMP felt like we were still “pretending” we were going to live in Portugal, because our visas were still pending. I can report that, as of 12:42 PM CST on Wednesday February 14, 2024, play time is officially over.

That’s the timestamp on the email Jill and I both received from the Embassy of Portugal which read:

“Dear Sir/Madam

We inform that your visa was approved and is now ready to be issued, you can send us your passport so we can stamp the visa and mail it back to you as soon as possible…”

By 12:43 PM CST, Jill had texted me: “We have visas!!!!!!”

And at 12:45 PM CST I texted back: “Holy sh*t!!!!!!”

Within an hour Jill was at the UPS Store, overnighting our passports to the Embassy of Portugal. I bet you’re thinking…

Wait, overnight via UPS? Isn’t that FedEx’s sweet spot?

It turns out that the Embassy of Portugal prefers UPS. We know that because:

1. Jill is a member of the Facebook group “Americans & FriendsPT” and their foolproof steps to getting through the visa process say specifically to use UPS NOT FEDEX
2. When we applied for our visas in December at VFS, part of our application fee went toward a return UPS Overnight envelope that the Embassy of Portugal would ultimately use to return our newly-festooned passports to us. That was kind of a neat touch for reasons I’ll expand upon momentarily
3. There are first-person reports of people Fedex-ing their passports to the Embassy of Portugal and the passports disappearing completely somewhere between the gates of the Embassy and their internal destination of the Consular Section. And then the people whose passports disappeared had to get replacement passports. But when the replacement passports were sent correctly VIA UPS, the new passport number didn’t match the passport number on the original visa application. So the Consular Section would not paste the visa into the new passport – meaning those poor Fedex-using-unfortunates had to start all over!

Sure enough, by 10:30 EST on Thursday February 15th we had confirmation that our passports were safely through the gates of the Embassy of Portugal.

We were kind of expecting them to take a day or two to get our visas affixed and headed back to us. This is where the pre-paid UPS envelope from our VFS visa appointment came in…

We already had the UPS return tracking number from our December 11th VFS appointment! So Jill preemptively set up UPS alerts for that tracking number and before end of day on Thursday it was already pinging her from the UPS system and showing delivery in Austin on Friday morning.

One of the interesting aspects of the visa process we’ve just been through is that there are some details that you just don’t know until you get your passport back with the visa in it. The two key details that are emblazoned on the visa are:

1. The start date of the visa, which in our case is March 1
2. The web-link for the visa-holder’s pre-scheduled non-negotiable Agency for Immigration, Migration, and Asylum (AIMA) appointment

I’m going to nerd out on our Portuguese visas for a moment…

Portugal has its own sovereign visa regime, but as part of both the EU and the Schengen Area Portugal has to color inside of those two bloc’s visa rules. US passport holders can generally enter both the EU and Schengen Area as a tourist without a visa. However, there’s something called the “Schengen 90/180 Rule” that comes into play for us. What that rule means is that you can be in Schengen Area without a visa for 90 days in any 180 day period and once you’ve reached your 90 day mark you have to exit the Schengen region for at least 90 days. You can bop back and forth between Schengen Area countries as much as you want under the 90/180 regime, but all days in the Schengen Area count toward your 90 days. There are a couple of EU countries that are not part of the Schengen Area (Ireland and Cyprus) and four non-EU countries that are a part of the Schengen Area (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein), but for the purposes of our example we are all-Schengen Region all the time.

Now we get to the Portuguese visa that Jill and I have just been issued, which is called the Portugal D7 Residence Visa. The D7 visa itself does not authorize us to reside in Portugal. The D7 visa authorizes us to REMAIN IN PORTUGAL UNTIL OUR RESIDENCY REQUEST HAS BEEN ADJUDICATED, meaning that we can stay in Portugal from first time we enter with our new visas until we are approved for formal residency by the AIMA so long as we don’t re-enter Portugal via passport control more than one additional time prior to being approved for residency.

If the process is working as intended, one gets their D7 and must enter Portugal via passport control point after the start date of the visa, but less than 120 days after the start date. Satisfactory evidence of entry is a dated entry stamp in our passport or a boarding pass for our inbound flight.

This brings us to the second important piece of information imprinted on our visas: the web-link to our respective AIMA appointments.

D7 visa holders must present themselves to AIMA at the appointed time and place with proof that they’ve entered Portugal since the start date of their visa and a packet of supporting documentation for their residency application. That packet contains much of the same type of information we provided with our initial visa application, but with a bias toward proving that we are living in Portugal. For example, at our VFS appointment we had to show US assets that would support us moving and at the AIMA appointment we have to show Novo Banco monthly statements that indicate we’ve been funding and using that account for ongoing operating expenses in Portugal. We also trade out the Schengen Travel Insurance, which we had to get to apply for the visa and will repatriate us back to the US in the event of medical catastrophe while we are waiting for residency, for evidence of private health insurance in Portugal until we are eligible for Portugal’s national healthcare system – which happens when we are granted residency in Portugal. We are not concerned with pulling together the requisite AIMA packets, because Jill has been all over this for the better part of a year. But the important bit is that we cannot miss our scheduled AIMA appointment.

And on the other end of the AIMA appointment, our D7 visa only allows us one additional exit/entry through Portuguese passport control until we get our residency cards, which I assume is a nod to the Schengen Area rules and the fact that the D7 visa is in place to let us exceed the Schengen 90/180 rule while we await formal residency.

Our AIMA appointments are… DRUMROLL PLEASE….

April 30th! Jill’s is at 11:00 AM and mine is at 11:30AM.

Piece of cake, right? Not so fast…

Jill’s appointment is in Viseu, 2 hours and 15 minutes from SMP, and mine is a scant 30 minutes later in Coimbra, 1 hour and 15 minutes down the road from Viseu.

Appointment transportation logistics notwithstanding, that means we have to be boots and paws on the ground in Portugal for the duration sometime during the week of April 22.

That’s nine weeks and change from today.

There’s a whole bunch to do in those nine weeks, but the top priority is getting everything in place to get Woody and Bulleit safely from Austin to SMP. That’s the biggest move-related stressor either of us have. We are working with PetRelocation.com to get that sorted.

The plan is to rent out our Austin house while we are gone which means we’ve also got to get whatever we are not moving to SMP out of the house, and disposition cars, etc.

And I’ve already started working on lining a new-to-us Renault in Portugal.

Adventure is indeed out there…