portugal is lovely tho the langage is difficult.
do make sure that you have up to date info, as I think I was just reading they were tightening up...

Oh, I'm all set - so long as USDA is still functioning enough to issue my Cats' health certificates before departure and martial law isn't declared first. D8 visa issued 63 days after appointment, leaving on the 25th, one month AirBnB reserved for the housing search, and best of all, I hit the jackpot and got a much-coveted permanent residency card appointment only 10 weeks after arrival, and only an hour from Lisbon (some people wait more than a year for theirs and spend hundreds of hours phoning and emailing AIMA for the appointment).

Rather annoyed at the recent shift in the EUR <-> USD rate though, as it reads on my desire to get enough money outside the US to survive on, worst-case. Now that Thiel and Musk are repurposing the SSA databases to suppress people they don't like, I expect they'll quickly figure out that declaring someone dead in the SSA database to prevent their accessing any financial services etc. need not be limited to just immigrants, but can trivially be done to citizens they don't like, as well.