Ok... prepare yourself for a long and boring read. I've been looking into shipping for quite a while now, and now after several glasses of wine, thought it was time to put pinkies to keyboard.
The shipping industry seems to me to be amazingly relaxed. Jen has been nagging me to find out when Charlie will arrive in Baltimore. The trouble is I can't give her an exact date. Every shipping company I have phoned have pretty much said "ahhh yeah man, dounnnnt worrrrry about a thang... just gis a caaaall 3 daaaays before ya want to go". Now, to me this seems just a tad on the relaxed side.
Being based in Southampton it seemed logical to us to try to find shipping from here, but every company quoted from Felixstowe. This seems to be the best and cheapest place to send a container from. So I asked on the ever faithful LR4x4 forum for peoples experiences with shipping companies... sure enough the responses supported my experiences. But as with all forum posts, some good suggestions were also made. I was pointed in the direction of Kingstown Shipping who are based in Hull. They specialise in the transportation of cars between the USA and Blighty. I spoke to a chap called Steve who was very helpful and full of re-assuring assurances along the lines of "Dounnnnnt worrrry... about a thang". But I have to admit, even after the posts from people doing similar things, that I am still nervous about this whole shipping milarky. Steve has assured me that he will contact me in plenty of time to arrange our shipping, and I don't doubt him, but in the shipping world, plenty of time is like a week before, and this is doing our nuts in!! I'm sure if we were more experienced in the international travel and shipping game that this wouldn't be a problem, but as it's our virgin trip...
Anyway, after a few phone calls to Steve at Kingstown I found out that it takes between 8 and 14 days for a container to ship from Felixstowe to Baltimore and that they sail on a Monday. So now we have a rough guestimate about when Charlie will arrive in the USA.
Through my chats with Steve I also worked out that Charlie will not fit in a 20ft container! The opening is 2.27m. Charlie Camel is 2.34m tall. This presented us with a bit of a problem. We have 7cm to loose in height. Varoius options were discussed like taking the rear springs out, letting the tyres down, using a ratchet straps around the chassis and axle. In the end we just opted to go for a 40ft high cube container which is 2.58m tall. It's a couple of hundred quid extra, but there are no worries about Charlie fitting, and the potential for damage is a lot less.
Time to go make sandwiches for work tomorrow.... more will follow!
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