A few lines on the “administrivia” required to execute on the plan.  First we quickly realized that the Schengen rule will be a bother for us.  Essentially the rule states that a non EU citizen such as Canadians can stay in Europe only 90 days in any 180 day window. I will not give you chapter and verse on this, just look it up.  As I was gathering info on this, the Consulat Français suggested to us that we obtain a visa which would permit us to stay one year and is renewable. This required the collection of a number of documents from original birth certificate to criminal record check and various financial disclosures in all 3 cm worth of paper. It took us 3 months to get the paperwork together.  We then set an appointment at the Consulat once we had everything.  The appointment was 30 minutes, efficiently done and a week later we had our visas.  The more difficult part was to interpret the information on the website. Although in English, the Consulat will not answer questions or help fill them out.

Once you get the visas, you need an additional step after you are in the country for 2-3 months.  This step is the procurement of an OFII stamp for each of us.  This require a visit to an OFII office, in our case in Toulouse. The staff was nice and helpful.  It did require lining up and waiting your turn. There they check you out medically to ensure you are in good health and will not be a burden on the system.  The exam was quick and efficient but it still felt like an intrusion.  OFII stands for the Office Français de l’immigration et l’Intégration.

What will be interesting is the renewal process.  It requires us to present ourselves to a prefecture and ask for the renewal.  Our assigned prefecture is the “Préfecture des Hautes-Pyrénées”  and when you look at the website we note that they answer the phone only 2 half days a week.  I hope that this is so they can process efficiently the requests in the other 8 half days of the week.

Hint: Be on time for the OFII appointment otherwise you get bumped to the end of the line and this may lead to hours (6) of waiting as related to us by fellow sailors.

The conclusion of the story is: Do not color outside the required lines, be reasonable and fulsome in your disclosures and it will go smoothly.

The second issue we had to deal with was money or more precisely how to get to it.  We did not want to use our Canadian credit cards with the associated fees.  We did not want to go to a currency exchange every few weeks to translate some Canadian money into Euro, again with the associated fees.  We found a solution with the help of HSBC.  I have been a client of theirs for 30 years or so and they offered us to open an account in their french banking subsidiary.  It required a few steps but we got it.  We now have a french account, a french credit card and debit card. A love it when a plan clicks.  We just refill it every quarter. This was a huge win as we could, using this account, get a french mobile phone plan and a french phone, more on this later.