RORO – The Blue Van – Overland Travels

Maine, Canada, and Scotland

Max — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 22:27:04 +0000

We got to Maine and met up with my mom’s friend and went got lobster for the first time, which tasted weird, and ice cream. Then we headed up north to a small town on the border of Canada to get food and supplies before crossing the border. After we got into Canada we drove to the Bay of Fundy, which is the coolest thing I’ve seen on this trip so far. We stayed there for about an three hours till we headed back to the camper. The transmisson hose sprung a leak and spewed transmission fluid all over the ground. We stayed at the park for another hour cleaning up the fluid, before we drove slowly to a store to get some more fluid. We returned to the bay to see the high tide, which had risen about twenty feet. We headed out to Halifax. We arrived at Halifax the next day and slept in a Wal-Mart parking lot and had frozen meals for dinner that night. When we woke up we were in a transmission shop parking lot, and we were about to have our transmission rebuilt. The people at the shop bumped us up ahead of the four other cars because we had to ship out in the morning. It took them nine hours to rebuild the transmission. We drove to a KoA just outside of Halifax and all took showers and did laundry. The next morning we dropped off my mom, my brother and my sisters at the airport, and me and my dad went to the shipping yard to drop off our camper for shipment. After that we met up with my mom and sisters in downtown to walk around. We visited the Alantic Museum, which had a exhibit on the Halifax Explosion, the largest man made explosion before the nuclear bomb. We took a ferry over to the bus station and got pizza to take to the airport. The flight was five and a half hours long. We landed in Glasgow and took a bus the the main bus terminal. From there we took a bus to Edenburgh, which took and hour, and walked to our apartment in the Royal Mile. We sat around the first day. I couldn’t fall asleep to 4 AM that night. The next day, my mom, dad, Sylvia and I walked to the store to get food and took a bus back to the house. My dad and Jack went out to a casino and me and rest my my family stayed home.

From Mark – Shipping adventures part 2

admin — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:31:44 +0000

Ryan I and got up at 6:45 am for day two. This was about an hour later than I wanted to. We got some free coffee (a better start to this day than the day before) and headed back to Arturo’s office to drop off the dock receipts. We took the metro to the station closest to the office. This was the Miami airport. Then we took a cab directly to the office. This was over the objections of Mr. Public Transportation, Ryan. It ended up costing us $32.00. I should have listened.

We got to the officer about 8:30 and gave Arturo the receipts. He then had to go to customs to do things that are still unknown to me. He dropped Ryan and I off at a Starbucks near his office where we were going to wait until he was done. Then we could get the titles to the van and trailer back.

While at Starbucks, SC Line called and said we needed to have Hazardous Material paperwork filled out for the two propane tanks we had on the trailer. After a little investigation, I again found that this was something I needed a customs broker to do, and it would cost about $150 to $200. Arturo was already costing us $170 and I didn’t want to spend more money, especially to ship two tanks I could buy when we got to Cartagena for less money. So SC said they would take the tanks off for us. I hope someone gets to use them on their grill or something.

One more mysterious piece of paperwork we needed was called the Bill of Lading. I am told this is something like your boarding pass to a plane. Arturo wanted to know who was going to handle it for us. He could not. We ended up contacting Martha Gonzalez, a freight forwarder, who was suggested by SC and said she could help us. This turned out to be a great thing.

Martha was also in Doral and picked Ryan and I up at the Starbucks and took us to her office. It turns out the bill of lading isn’t supposed to be issued until the vehicles got on the boat. She works with SC Line regularly and personally know the owners. Since we were a special case (hey now, you all pipe down!) she was able to get them to issue the paperwork early. Also, Martha is from Colombia, and handles freight shipments all over South America. She spent some time setting up our arrival in Cartagena so everything will go smoothly once we get there. She also got me the opportunity to travel ON THE BOAT with the van and trailer (it’s about who you know)! Unfortunately, the dogs could not accompany me, so I had to let that one go. More about that later. It’s too bad…..they even have a pool!

After about two hours of hanging out with Martha, everything was done. She did have to hang onto the titles for the vehicles until they are loaded onto the boat. This was in case customs had to inspect them to determine if they were stolen or not. Apparently this is the biggest concern US Customs has for shipping vehicle out of the country. Martha drove us to the metro station and we began our journey home. It was about 1:45 pm.

Ryan and I were taking a Greyhound from Fort Lauderdale to Tampa. We took the train from Doral (or wherever it was Martha dropped us off at) to Fort Lauderdale. This took about an hour. We then walked to the Greyhound staion, which was about 2 1/2 miles away. We got there around 5:15 pm. The bus left at 7:00, so we went to get some food, our first of the day. At this point I was pretty beat.

Our bus stopped in Orlando where we had to switch to another bus. We had an hour layover and then head out to Tampa. We got in at about 1:15 am. Michelle and Max picked us up in my parents car and we got back to the house about 2 am. Finally, the adventure within an adventure was over.

Leap and the net will appear!

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:59:10 +0000

The van and the camper are now securely in Port Everglades. Mark and Ryan are in Miami, taking cabs and trains and staying at the Rodeway Inn. In case anyone was wondering, here is how you ship your 56′ vehicle to Colombia:

Get as many quotes as you can from all the different places you can think of. We started with Colon – Cartagena and got quotes from Jacksonville, Miami, Houston, Costa Rica, Mexico and Los Angeles to Quito, Lima, Santiago and Cartagena. There is no pattern here. Shortest distances = most expensive prices. Sometimes. Most expensive one way quote was $23,000, Houston to Colombia. Cheapest quote: $5800 Miami to Colombia.
Get a Freight Expediter. Or when you grow up, you can be a Freight Expediter – this was never a job I even knew existed. Have your freight company suggest one. Ours is Arturo Vallejo, President of Import Express (http://importexpress.us). For $100, he does all the customs paperwork and some mysterious computer entries that laypeople cannot do,
Make sure you have all your original documents (title, registration, etc) or you may find yourself in the unfortunate situation where you need to have your teenager forge a really good copy. That didn’t happen. Just saying.
Make copies of all documents
Take them to the port and spend hours clearing security.
Get official measurements (shipping is by the cubic meter — in our case, it is $60 a cubic meter).
Leave.
Wait! Fill out the IMO form because there are propane tanks
Find nice hotel in Miami near Freight Expediter’s office (hardest task of the day!)
Meet the next morning with your Freight Expediter and complete paperwork.
Decide the propane tanks cannot go — too much paperwork
Drive with Shipping Company staff back to vehicle to remove propane tanks

Have we paid? No. Do we know how much it will be? No. Do we know how to pay? Possibly. Do we know that some corrupt customs agent won’t steal the Holiday Barbie we bought Sylvia for Christmas and stashed in the bathtub? No. Do we know if the Colombian customs people will let us take in the 4 pounds of vegan textured vegetable protein? No.

What do we know? The kids and I are in Florida for 9 more days without a car.

Mark and the &%^$#@*&) dogs still do not have a ticket. The dogs, they are a pain. Oh I wish we had never gotten pets. They cause so many problems when you are trying to drive to Chile. They need to depart from Miami, requiring another trip to Miami by Mark (and the dogs). That is a whole other story.

Preparing the van and camper for a sea voyage — and freaking out a little bit

admin — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 05:52:36 +0000

On Sunday, the van and camper and Mark and Ryan depart Dunedin for Port Everglades. On Monday morning, they meet up with Aturo to get the paperwork ready for customs and the van & camper go on a giant RORO ship. Mark and Ryan are taking a Greyhound (Ryan’s idea) back. This is stressful as it completely 100% commits us to leaving. Some small freaking out moments happened. So much in not knowable — will people steal stuff from inside? Will it cost much more than we planned? Will we get stuck in South America, unable to return??

But the moments passed and we all feel better. We spent all day cleaning and organizing the camper for whatever kind of Colombian inspection lies ahead. Laundry, paperwork (and holy cow, is there a lot of paperwork!), van maintenance — so much fun. Tomorrow we condense our personal belongings into three dufflebags for the next 13 days and for the inevitable plane trip to Cartagena on 12/12/12. Then we are stuck here. Without a car. For 13 days.

We have reservations for two rooms inside the walled city – one family room that sleeps 6 and one additional room that sleeps 3. The dogs will be guests of a veterinarian down the street from our hotel. The van & camper is scheduled to arrive on 12/13, which is Thursday. But the RORO ship stops along the way and it could be delayed so we may not be able to retrieve the vehicles until Monday.

One thing we did do this evening is to try to make reservations for language immersion in Ecuador. Mar Azul is our first choice (http://ecuador-spanishschool.com/) – they have salsa lessons, too. Not sure how they feel about 6 kids being there, we’ll see.