>
Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2000 03:01:32 -0700
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.5 (32)
I my experience, one of the cheapest ways to move cargo is to fly with it.
So if you have more than your luggage allowance, just take more and pay the
excess luggage charge. It's usually far cheaper than any other way of
moving stuff.
Another option is if you know others nearby who are traveling, give each
one an extra suitcase. My coworker here in the SF Bay area is a member of
a local German club and he knows from the German school when families are
moving to or from Germany and he can arrange to put stuff into their
shipments.
It's possible that in this swiss-list there may be some people who fly back
and forth on business with very little luggage and very frequently(?).
Of course if you have a huge amount of stuff, then you should ship it by
sea. When I moved from Munich to San Francisco, I had all my stuff packed
into a "liftvan" which is 1/3 of a half container. It's about 1.2m x 1.2m
x 2.2m or so(?) and fits quite a lot of stuff if you omit furniture. The
shipping charge is ridiculously low, the costs begin to add up when you pay
for clearing customs, pay the truckers, pay the fork lift operator, pay the
loading and unloading of the crate, pay to throw the trash away, pay the
handlers in between, etc, etc, etc.
I cleared my stuff through customs myself and rented a 24 foot truck and
drove my crate from Oakland, across the Bay Bridge and to the top of San
Francisco, all by myself. The 24' truck was hard to find since most trucks
are smaller, but the awkward liftvan crate will not fit into anything
smaller due to it's height. If it was legal to uncrate the crate where I
picked it up, then it would have fit into an ordinary 19 foot U-Haul box
truck, but they don't allow the customer to uncrate on the property. I had
to uncrate the goods myself and I gave all the plywood sheets to a homeless
guy I know in San Francisco and his buddies. They loved it they showed my
a dumpster where I could unload the packaging papers in the hours after
midnight when nobody was watching.
If you have a bad back (or are thinking about how fun it is to have a bad
back), then it's far better to just pay for door-to-door service,
especially if your employer will reimburse you.
My last, but not least suggestion: Buy a digital camera and photograph
everything you put in each box (and photograph the box too). This is great
for insurance purposes, but is even better so you can view your whole
inventory on your laptop computer and quickly find which box to open to
find that thing you are looking for. I bought a digital camera at Fry's
Electronics, shot all my photos in Munich while packing, and when I
returned to the Bay area I returned the camera at Fry's .... so I didn't
even really pay for the camera and never paid for film! (I have since
purchased a used version of the same camera since I found it to be a very
useful thing to have...)
-chris
private email address: chris-c_at_ibm.net
=================================================================
To unsubscribe from the swiss-list mailing list send the
message body of "unsubscribe swiss-list" to majordomo_at_swiss-list.com
or visit http://www.swiss-list.com
Received on Thu Aug 03 2000 - 03:02:17 PDT
