Day: November 26, 2025

• The ‘Schengen shuffle’ allows non-EU citizens to stay in Europe for extended periods of time.
• Eric and Christina Schwendeman, both Americans, have made Italy their base since 2022.
• “It’s the best of both worlds for us,” Christina told Business Insider.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Eric and Christina Schwendeman, who left the US in 2022 to retire in Italy. The couple now does the “Schengen shuffle.” Schengen countries allow non-EU visitors to stay for up to 90 days within a 180-day period. The “Schengen shuffle” refers to the practice of non-EU travelers hopping between both Schengen and non-Schengen countries indefinitely. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Christina: We had gotten our elective residency visas, which allowed us to live in Italy full time. Those were valid for two years, so after that period was up, we decided for a variety of reasons that we wouldn’t renew them.

Eric: A lot of the motivation was that we’re traveling so much and we want to see so much of the world.

Christina: We started the Schengen shuffle in December 2024. There are 29 countries in the Schengen Agreement, which essentially are countries in Europe that allow free and open borders between them. So, if we want to drive from Italy to France, we don’t go through passport control.

We decided we wanted to do that instead of being full-time residents of Italy. Italy is one of the 29 countries in the Schengen area, so we said, “Okay, we can keep our house in Italy, stay there for 90 days, then go travel for 90 days, and come back.”

It’s the best of both worlds for us.

The Schwendemans have visited around 12 new countries this year

Eric: We’ve seen around 12 new countries this year, far and wide, from Southeast Asia to the Balkans.

We did Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia. We went to Hong Kong and Macau. Then, we flew down to the Philippines for two weeks. We spent almost two weeks in India and then came home to Italy.

One of the things that we committed to was spending ample time in areas that allow us to see it, to experience it, and give ourselves days of rest in between, instead of just racing nonstop 24/7.

Christina: It allows you to become more a part of communities and — I think a lot of people use this phrase — more of a traveler than a tourist.

A great example for us is that we spent a month in Perast, Montenegro. It’s a very small town. By the time we left, we knew everyone. Like Eric said, we made friends that we’ve seen again since we left. We could go into any restaurant and know everybody by name. To be able to do that in a different community is just something really special.

Eric: I would say that 85% of the time we’re staying in Airbnbs.

Christina: If you get an Airbnb with your own kitchen, you can go grocery shopping and cook at home. That makes a big difference for us. If we’re staying anywhere longer than a week, it’s Airbnb because we want to feel like we have a base.

Transportation can get tricky, but we try not to fly a lot because it’s obviously the most expensive option. A lot of countries have phenomenal train systems, so we try to take advantage of those.

And packing is interesting. For 90 days at a time, we committed to each other that we would only each take one medium-sized suitcase.

Christina and Eric’s best tip for doing the Schengen shuffle: plan

Eric: Plan, plan, and plan some more when you think you’re done.

Christina: And then be ready to realize that something will inevitably go wrong with that plan. Flexibility is key. Travel is never without hiccups, so just be ready to roll with the punches.

It’s something you’ll remember for the rest of your life. We try never to think that anything that happens through this is ever bad. It’s just part of the adventure.

• Retailers across the US are gearing up for the peak sales event of the holiday shopping season.
• For Target, this means loading stores up with toys, electronics, apparel, and more.
• Target took Business Insider inside a warehouse where products are sorted and sent to regional stores.

Target really needs a win this holiday season.

The company has struggled in recent years with declining comparable sales, and it has cautious expectations for the all-important fourth quarter of this year.

One aspect of the business that incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke is keenly interested in improving is making sure products are actually available on shelves for shoppers to buy.

“If you’ve trusted us with a trip to the store, we can’t let you down by being out of stock, and we haven’t been good enough over the last several years on that front,” he said during a November earnings call.

Few days are more unforgiving of out-of-stocks than the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday has changed a lot in recent years, but it’s still the marquee sales event of the holiday shopping season.

That means stocking stores with the right quantities of toys, electronics, apparel, and other items.

The bullseye retailer invited Business Insider to take an exclusive look behind the curtain at one of its distribution centers, where merchandise from suppliers gets sorted and sent to individual stores across the region.

Target also fulfills more than 97% of its e-commerce orders from one of its retail stores, so that means almost everything the company sells online or offline must first pass through one of these distribution facilities.

Business Insider visited the warehouse a week before Thanksgiving and saw firsthand the overwhelming volume of items that go into ensuring each Target store has exactly what it needs each day.

Here’s how Target is gearing up for the holiday rush.

Target’s regional distribution center is located a half hour outside Milwaukee in the town of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.

The 1.5 million square foot facility serves 81 stores across four states: Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Senior site director Julie O’Clary started her career with Target as an intern at this facility and has worked at several locations over the years.

O’Clary says her facility typically processes about 600,000 cartons of merchandise in a normal week, but that number balloons to 800,000 a week during the holiday rush.

An additional 300,000 cartons also flow through the facility without active sorting, bringing the holiday volume to well north of a million cartons this week.

The sprawling warehouse could fit nearly 26 football fields and runs like a small city with more than 1,050 employees.

Trucks arrive from suppliers with inventory that must be unloaded and sorted. The warehouse handles roughly 45,000 different product codes.

A shipment of toys is unloaded from the truck onto conveyor belts and scanned with a laser rig.

Here’s where pallets of toys like these Cozy Coupe cars from the Little Tikes brand arrive.

The inbound loading docks are a ballet of people and forklifts in the days leading up to Black Friday.

“We see a lot of brown boxes here, but inside that brown box, there’s toys or cosmetics — something that our guests want, something that brings them joy — so that’s our job,” Clary said.

All around the facility, towers of best-selling Black Friday items can be seen — such as these flat-screen TVs.

The warehouse also gives a sneak peek into what could be the next viral toy, like these child-sized Target shopping carts.

Here, pallets of Mario Kart racing toys are stacked next to electric scooters and kid-sized four-wheelers.

Almost everything in the building needs a label, and these printers spool off barcodes nonstop.

The company also routinely tracks all problems — and potential problems — on whiteboards throughout the facility, which are updated hourly.

Though it’s not a store, some employees still wear Target’s classic red plaid shirts.

This facility is also where Target tailors inventory orders to give each individual store the exact number of items it needs.

For example, each box here is headed to a different store, and each contains different quantities of apparel in the right sizes and colors.

Items are then sent upstairs to a network of conveyor belts that guide each box to the correct truck.

Boxes pass by at high speed, and the system automatically slows down to allow items from multiple belts to merge into one.

As one of Target’s higher-volume distribution centers, the flow of goods continues around the clock.

Some shipments take a detour for extra labeling.

An elevated conveyor belt carries sorted merchandise to trucks waiting at the loading docks. Other big and bulky items are stored near the outbound docks for quicker access.

Boxes are automatically tipped onto rollers that feed right into a waiting truck.

The parade of boxes are then loaded into tractor-trailers like a life-size game of Tetris.

More evidence of the holidays is on display in the form of a pallet of Target-branded artificial Christmas trees on the loading docks.

O’Clary says the facility processes about 40 million outbound cartons a year. Some stores receive a truck every day, but during the holiday rush, they may take multiple deliveries a day.

O’Clary says her team is putting in thousands of hours of overtime this week to make sure Target customers have well-stocked shelves for their holiday shopping.

• US Coast Guard helicopter pilots and precision marksmen are constantly training and evolving their strategies.
• The squadrons are instrumental to the drug interdiction process, hunting drug boats from the air.
• They adjust plans on-the-fly, sometimes switching from airborne use of force to search and rescue.

USCG HITRON JACKSONVILLE, Florida — In the eastern Pacific and Caribbean waters, Coast Guard helicopter teams are chasing down suspected drug boats, putting vessels out of action, and setting the stage for boarding.

The elite pilots and precision marksmen of the Helicopter Interdiction Squadron, or HITRON, have to be prepared for drug interdiction operations to go sideways. It could be night, the drug boat could be zigging and zagging everywhere trying to get away, and suspects could be jumping overboard.

No matter what the pilots have to be ready to keep up the chase, and the shooters on board have to be able to make the shot when it matters.

Business Insider had the opportunity recently to see them in action, training for these missions, aimed at curbing the flow of dangerous narcotics into the US.

“It’s like running with ankle weights on,” Lt. Com. Jamel Choker, a pilot and mission commander at HITRON, told Business Insider, speaking on the intensity of the training that goes into preparing for actual missions. “You want to train as hard as possible so that when you get out in the real world, it’s kind of easier.”

The Coast Guard formally stood up HITRON in 2003 at Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Florida. Over the recent decades, it’s been involved in over 1,000 interdictions resulting in billions of dollars worth of drugs seized from smugglers.

HITRON’s helicopter pilots arrive as trained and experienced aircraft commanders. No matter what they flew before, they learn the ins and outs of Coast Guard helicopters like the MH-65 Dolphin — older airframes that go through a dedicated maintenance pipeline, leaving Cecil Field and returning looking brand new.

Choker described the job as unique because it’s both aviation and law enforcement, and the missions can quickly change from hunting drug boats to search and rescue in the water to flagging suspected drug cargo if it goes overboard.

Split-second decisions

Just last week, Choker and his crew received an award for a pursuit in which a drug boat was making “tight turns and zig-zags and everything,” he said, before its passengers suddenly started jumping overboard.

“All four of them jumped in the water,” Choker said. “They left the throttle engaged, and they left the wheel cut to the right.”

Coast Guard personnel then switched to search and rescue mode, deploying life rings. As they were trying to help, they saw the renegade vessel circle around beneath the helicopter out of view. The boat was heading right for one of the smugglers in the water. It would’ve been a serious hit.

“We made a split-second decision that we were going to use the precision rifle to disable the boat,” Choker shared. It took the gunner nine rounds in under five seconds to cut the engines. “It came within five feet of running him over,” he said.

At Cecil, Coast Guard pilots and marksmen are constantly flying and training when they’re not on deployments, which regularly last months at a time. They practice against a team pretending to be drug traffickers, who will change up tactics based on what’s been observed from recent real-world runs.

The actual piloting of the Dolphin is something that’s “predictable and intuitive to you when you’ve been training for thousands of hours,” Choker told Business Insider. “It does take a lot of training in order to know that I need the helicopter to do an extreme angle of bank, and I need to only move my hand three-fourths of an inch in order to do that.”

Precision marksmen are likewise constantly training to get the perfect shot while maintaining clear communication with the pilots. The training pipeline requires knowledge of what weapons to use for specific purposes.

The mounted machine gun on the Dolphin is for firing warning shots when a suspected drug vessel doesn’t stop after initial verbal warnings. Other rifles, like the M107 semi-automatic .50 caliber sniper rifle and M110 Semi Automatic Sniper System chambered for 7.62×51mm NATO-standard rounds, are useful for knocking out vessel engines depending on the size.

The M107 is effective at longer range against harder targets, like enemy vehicles, while the M110 is suited to engaging personnel and lightly protected material targets.

Petty Officer Second Class Phillip McCarty, an avionics electrical technician and precision marksman at HITRON, told Business Insider that training, both on land and in air, is designed to prepare marksmen for the challenges of shooting effectively during interdictions, when a helicopter flies alongside a moving boat and pilots help the marksmen line up their shot.

The pilots have to match speed and attempt to maneuver to provide the best shot, but the shooters have to be prepared to overcome vibrations, jarring movements, and other potential impacts.

While they want to make every shot count, getting a clean hit to disable the vessel is easier said than done, especially when suspected drug boats try to make a run for it.

He said he’s had cases where it only took four rounds to stop a smuggling boat, but there have been others where the drug runners were “very erratic and driving all over the place and at nighttime.” That took 32 rounds to kill the engine.

Depending on the circumstances, environment, and drug runner tactics, the marksmen find themselves having to embrace HITRON’s adapt and overcome strategy. “You’ve got to change your methodology on the fly out there,” McCarty said.