Travel Visas

A Visa is the “ … official authorization appended to a passport, permitting entry into and travel within a particular country or region.” Our passports have been stamped dozens of times over the years, often the stamp was applied with little or no attention paid to who we were, and most of the time the stamp did not cost anything. Sometimes the stamp was identified as a Visa, other times it was just a date/place stamp that indicated when and where we crossed the border.

We have crossed international borders in Europe 227 times, and had to “apply” for a Visa, only a very few times. A Visa was needed to visit East Germany, another to visit East Berlin in 1970, and the same two Visa’s were again needed in 1980. Each Visa was received at each border, with little problem.

In 1980 and 1988 we crossed the border from Italy to Yugoslavia, in 1985 we arrived on a ferry boat from Italy, in 1989 we drove into Yugoslavia from Greece, and each time the Visa stamp was applied at the border, with no problem, at no cost. In 1988 the country of France required a Visa (obtained in Los Angeles, before we left home), but no one cared to look at it as we crossed the French border, six or eight times that year.

In 1980 we decided to visit Budapest, Hungary. After a few days visiting in Vienna, we went to the Hungarian Embassy and applied for a Visa. After we filled out some papers they sent us to the Hungarian Government Travel Agency to pay for the Visa, for the one-day tour, and the round-trip bus ticket. The Visa and the tickets cost $212 for two, and on the ticket it says the bus will pick us up at the campsite, at 6:30 AM.

We were at the street well before 6:30, waited until 7:20, then called the Travel Agency and found there was a mistake, our bus had been there promptly at 6:00 AM. We drove downtown, picked up our Visas, got a refund for the cost of the tour, then decided to drive to Budapest in our Dodge camper.

We spent the night in the campsite in Budapest, then returned to Vienna the next day. In two days we had driven about 325 miles, from Vienna to Budapest and back. The whole trip cost us about $100 (gasoline, food, campsite, spending money) instead of the $212 it would have cost for the one-day tour, the bus trip, plus the cost for meals. We are sure we saw as much or more than we would have seen on the tour.