Jenn and I have wanted to move to Europe for a long time. We talked about it years ago, but it had always been one of those vague goals that we would accomplish someday.
When Jenn’s employer offered her a contract that would relocate her to Ireland, we thought the perfect opportunity had arrived. We immediately sold our motor home- (we owned it for exactly eight weeks). It was hard. The RV had been one of our alternative goals. When we bought the RV in August, it didn’t look like we’d move overseas soon, so we bought one for Walnut and I to travel around. We planned to pick Jenn up from the nearest airport and see the great sights in the States.
After the relocation offer, we started working on downsizing, selling our things. Over the next few fall months, I sold both of my motorcycles. We sold many things that had been important to us. A few months pass and contract negotiations break down. We were devastated at first. Here was our opportunity -and we sold our things- and it fell apart. We had made a lot of progress getting rid of our stuff and it seemed crazy to change course at this point.
We pushed forward in spite of no longer having a specific job offer. We sold our house, our car, just about everything. My sister generously agreed to store some things for us, so we moved some crates of pictures and Jenn’s diplomas to Iowa. We needed to decide where we would go and how to do it. We’d been researching visas in Europe for awhile and couldn’t decide which was easiest or which country would be the most dog friendly. In the end, we said screw it and chose Spain. (We had visited Barcelona two years prior and loved it)
I spent about a month getting the required paperwork together. We would be applying through the Chicago consulate so we followed their instructions. I got a lot of guidance from twobadtourists.com and bucking-the-trend.com. June 10 was our appointment and we received our visas in five weeks. We applied for the non lucrative visa and we will not work for an employer in Spain.
The visa process is pretty straight forward. Everything we needed was listed on the Chicago Spain Consulate website. The hardest part was getting the police reports from the state police. Our local police helped us fill out the history request, which required fingerprints. The history report took 6-8 weeks. Then we had to get the reports stamped with an apostille. The easiest way to get this done is in the Secretary of State office in downtown Chicago. So long as your document has been notarized, they will apostille it for $2.
Most of the documents had to be translated into Spanish. For this, we used an online translation service. There may have been a cheaper method, but the company we used was fast and they included stamps and signatures (I read that Spanish bureaucracy loves stamps and signatures).
The apartment we rented from vrbo.com for our first month sent us a lease agreement for our visa application. We bought health insurance from worldnomads.
All told, it was a little stressful because I set up our visa appointment with about 7 weeks notice, then tried to get our criminal history reports. I got mine in the mail a week before our appointment but Jenn’s (which was sent off in the same envelope) had not arrived. When calling to follow up, we discovered it hadn’t been completed but the state police offered to finish it and we could drive to Joliet-30 min away- and pick it up. (This was done the day before our visa appt). All the apostilles were completed the morning of our appointment with no time to spare.
