August 13, 2021
In Antwerp: Friday the 13th
There has been scattered grousing about how adversity-free this trip has been so far and how perpetually and unreasonably lucky Team Anderson seems to be. Why aren’t they sweltering in a heat wave like we are? Why aren’t they choking from fires? Why are they mask-free and eating Belgian waffles while we’re under tightening Covid constrictions here at home? Yadda, yadda, yadda. Life’s not fair.
All good points. As a bit of counterprogramming though we offer up today’s hellish fiasco, appropriately on Friday the 13th. We’ll return to regular programming tomorrow, hopefully featuring a delightful ride along a canal somewhere.
Some history
We bought our first Bike Fridays in 2009, and have flown with them on 22 tours since then. When we fly, we always take the Bike Fridays and transport them as normal luggage in Samsonite suitcases. This always presents a logistics problem, since we need the suitcases available to us at the end of the tour for the return flight. We’ve managed this in different ways over the years.
The simplest scenario is a loop tour that begins and ends in the same city. On these, the only issue is in finding a hotel that will store our suitcases until we return. We’ve done this 11 times now.
On A to B tours, we need help at both ends. We need a hotel willing to receive and store our suitcases after we ship them forward, and we need to manage the shipment itself. Six times now, we’ve managed to talk the hotel in our arrival city to manage the shipment for us. We’ve just left the suitcases behind and paid them a shipping and service fee. Because I like to keep track of things like this, these are the tours where we used this approach:
- 2012: from Rhodes to Mytilini, Greece
- 2013: from Blowing Rock, North Carolina to New York City
- 2013: from Faro, Portugal to Granada, Spain
- 2017: from Saint George, Utah to Grand Junction, Colorado
- 2018: from Chania, Greece to Ohrid, Macedonia
- 2018: from Dubrovnik, Croatia to Girona, Catalonia
Once, on our 2014 tour from Girona to Bilbao, we just took the suitcases down to the post office. The agents were willing to accept them as long as we just wrapped them in craft paper, which made for an interesting little project.
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Then, in 2017 we found what has seemed until now like the perfect solution. I don’t know how we first learned of this, but ever since we’ve just taken them to a UPS store. Simply wheel them in the front door, hand them over the counter unwrapped, pay a fee, and walk away.
Nothing could be simpler. The zipless shipment, to steal a phrase from Erica Jong. This has worked well ever since, and even held up through the time when the mail room in our hotel in Valencia didn’t recognize the shipment and sent it back to the UPS store in San Sebastián. To date, we’ve done this four times:
- 2017: Bilbao, Spain to Sete, France
- 2019: Santiago, Portugal to Valencia, Spain
- 2020: Ancona to Bari, Italy
- 2021: Minneapolis, Minnesota to West Hartland, Connecticut.
Actually, the 2020 execution was only partly successful. Because of Covid we were unable to ship the suitcases across an international boundary from Zagreb and had to take them with us on the ferry to Ancona and ship them forward from there. And even that didn’t work as planned because again blue to Covid we aborted the last half of the trip and had the impose on our hotel in Bari to reship them up to Bologna. Covid screwed up everything, really.
Friday the Thirteenth
Today is the day. It’s Friday, so we decide we’d better ship the suitcases to Viterbo (our final stop before the flight home) today, while the UPS stores are still open. I researched this in advance, and know that there are two UPS outlets in easy walking distance from our hotel. Ever since we started using this approach we’ve been careful to book our first hotel near a UPS store.
The nearest of the stores claims to open at 6:30. I forget why we’re uncertain about this one, but we decide to walk over first and make sure they’ll accept the suitcases before wheeling them over. We show up at about 9, but the storefront is still shuttered behind a gate. We can’t even tell what sort of store it is, or if it’s even still in business.
The second store isn’t open yet, so we return to the room, do some more research, and try to find a number to call rather than stopping by the other store or any of the other five UPS service points nearby. I create a GPS route to bike past them all until we find one open and willing, but in the meantime Rachael succeeds in finding a phone number for DHL, another shipping option. The news is not good - our only option is to take them to a full service DHL outlet several miles away, with the suitcases boxed and labeled before we arrive. After hearing our specifications she says it will cost roughly $450. Yikes!
A bit more research, and somehow we happen on a promising third option: Eurosender. I’d never heard of them before, but they sound like an excellent solution. They specifically describe shipments of suitcases such as ours, and how they have to be prepared. Shrink wrap them, place an order, and wait for a courier to pick them up. For our shipment, rates are reasonable: roughly 50 euros each for normal delivery, or $100 each for express. Sounds great.
There are catches. for normal delivery, the soonest pickup will be Monday. We plan to leave town Sunday, so that’s not good - it feels like we should be here if something goes amiss. So express sounds like the more expensive but best option because they’ll pick up the same day.
But there are catches with Express too. With this option, you have to print off the label yourself because the driver won’t be bringing it himself. And the order has to be placed before noon. It’s a bit after ten now, so if this is going to work we really need to rush. We need to find out if the hotel will give us access to a printer for the labels, and we have to find shrink wrap. And, of course, place and pay for the order and wrap the suitcases. We start mobilizing toward this idea, until it quickly becomes apparent that we’re out of time.
Rachael offers up the best solution - we’ll stay in Antwerp for one or two more days so we’ll be here for the pickup by standard delivery. That’s obviously a saner approach that gives us time to collect our wits and think everything through. I confirm with our hotel here that we can stay on longer, Rachael validates that we can still change or cancel our room in Ghent, and then I start working on submitting the order while Rachael goes on a scavenger hunt for some shrink wrap.
Rachael has more success with the shrink wrap than I do with the order, and returns an hour later with wrapping materials. Placing a shipment order takes some work though. I have to look up the dimensions of the suitcases (we don’t have a measuring tape), SWAG their weight (we don’t have a scale), and pull together the addresses of this hotel and our Airbnb in Viterbo. That done though, I complete the request and enter payment details.
The transaction fails. Our credit card company has rejected this huge $117 transaction for unknown reasons - presumably as a fraud check.
We have a backup option. I submit the payment again using our credit union debit card. It also fails.
We have a backup to our backup. I submit the payment a third time, using our Umpqua Bank debit card. It also fails.
Now what? I call Eurosender, and after waiting for about fifteen minutes in a phone queue I’m blessed to be able to speak with a real, live person. I discuss the situation with the man and he advises me to call our bank, have the transaction approved, and then their system should accept payment and schedule the pickup.
We call Bank of America. They only respond during normal business hours, east coast time. Umpqua Bank is the same, as is the credit union. Now though we get an email from our credit union alerting us of TWO charges for this shipment, and give two options - approve them both, or indicate that one or more is invalid. We choose door number two, and immediately our card is locked. We stew and sweat for awhile, wondering if we’ve just lost our access to our credit union account until we get a replacement card; but and then we get a text from the credit union to call them about a possibly fraudulent transaction. We call them up, we talk it through. They unlock the account and tell us to just resubmit the transaction and it should be accepted this time. We do, and it is!
There are probably multiple morals to this story, but one is that Eurosender looks like a good solution for the future. We can submit the request from home before even leaving on the tour and arrange for the suitcases to be picked up from our hotel after we arrive.
By now though we’re both thoroughly exhausted and content to just sit around the room until dinner and get to work on a new plan.
The new new plan
So how many new plans do you suppose we’ll end up with before this journey ends? It’s OK though. Biking from here to Ghent to Bruges and then taking the train to Luxembourg was a fallback solution anyway, one we dreamed up when the Netherlands looked like an invitation to a quarantine. As I said before, I’d really rather just start biking from here.
So, no Bruges, no Ghent, no Luxembourg - for this year at least. Instead we’re going to bike from here to Trier where we’ll pick up with the original plan. We play around with RideWithGPS for the next couple hours and come up with a route that looks viable and attractive.
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That done, we turn to our bookings, canceling the older ones and reserving the new ones. We’re nearly done when it occurs to us that we’re both starving. We have another fine meal at an outdoor table, enjoying the parade of colorful pedestrians and bikers pass by as we sit for the next hour and continue decompressing.
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