Moving Overseas with Camera Equipment.....!?!
Today's the day! After months of planning and preparing, the movers have descended on our house with a million boxes to move our effects to the United Kingdom. There have been many challenges along the way, the least of which has been figuring out how to get all of my camera equipment safely there. So I figured I'd share my saga...
Background:
This move is a 3-5 year position in the United Kingdom, so packing for it is a little different then packing for a long trip. When the military / Department of Defense packs and moves people around the wold, they do it in stages, which makes the whole thing more manageable for them and challenging for us.
Option 1: Household Goods (HHG)
This is the shipment where the majority of your effects travel - couches, beds, TVs, etc. It's also the slowest to arrive (2-3 months) and travels by truck and ship, so there's alot of loading/unloading. There is no temperature control and everything is packed on your behalf. Not a good place to put expensive camera equipment!
Option 2: Unaccompanied Baggage (aka Express)
This shipment is designed to travel by air and meet you just a few weeks after you arrive and provide the essentials while you wait for your HHG to arrive. They warn you up front not to pack anything fragile in this shipment as it is rough handled - and if they loose your stuff, you only get reimbursement up to $5k, which barely covers much camera equipment! So again, not a good place to put the gear!
Option 3: Ship it to myself
I can go to the post office and mail my equipment to myself, but the cost of insuring that is prohibitively expensive and the government wouldn't reimburse me for it, so that's also off the table!
Option 4: Storage
In theory, I could tell the government to store this equipment for me, but that kinda defeats the point.....?!
Option 5: Carry on your person
And here we are - the only option that makes any reasonable sense for the camera equipment. The government will pay for 2 checked bags per person (me+husband = 4x 50lbs bags) plus the airline gives one carry-on and one personal item each. While that seems like plenty of space, as soon as I account for clothes and a suitcase in pet supplies (food, litter box, leashes, etc), I'm down to hardly any luggage left! The only option is to get everything I want into a backpack that fits on my back - while a ThinkTank roller bag would be ideal given the volume of stuff to carry, I need to dedicate that space to other items (and I don't own a rolling camera bag).
I own a zillion backpacks that I could use for this task, but the choice was pretty easy - my MindShift Gear Rotation 180 bag. I have been using this backpack exclusively for the past 8 months and love it to death.... I've dragged it in the snow, rain, sand, and mud and it doesn't care. I even dropped it into a lake - no problem. So there's no reason to not use ol' reliable to carry almost $20,000 worth of gear overseas!
I have stuffed the Rotation 180 to the brim - it's now holding the following: Nikon D800 w/battery pack, Nikon D600, Nikon 80-400, Nikon 24-70, Nikon 14-24, Nikon speed light, and a ton of accessories, including controllers, filters, cables, and more. The bag tips the scales at almost 30 pounds packed, which is incredibly heavy, but its the only way to ensure the most valuable equipment arrives in one piece without any damage in shipping.
Fully loaded, the Mindshift Gear Rotation 180 tips the scales at over 25 lbs - which is pretty heavy for a camera bag- especially one being carried as a backpack!
The Mindshift Gear Rotation 180 on display in our hotel. I have stuffed almost all of the useable space with camera equipment, with the last bit of space reserved for "day of" items like passports, iPad, etc. Unfortunately the iPad camera isn't good enough to show all the dirt and dust on this bag from the miles of use I've put on it.
Inside the back compartmented of the Mindshift Gear Rotation 180 - I have jammed it full of gear! I would probably never hike with it like this since it's just jammed up, but this was the best way to transport all of the essentials, including lenses, flashes, camera bodies, chargers, filters, and more.
Meanwhile the DJI Phantom Vision 2+ has it's own (custom made) bag that we are using to transport it to the UK....
The DJI Phantom Vision 2+ Quadcopter in my custom made backpack. This will be the second "personal item" we will carry on the plane.
So how does the rest arrive?
A few days ago the first round of movers arrived to spend the day packing - they walked through the house with brown paper and wrapped every single item they could find. At one point our cat became a little concerned that he may be next to be wrapped! Included in this was some other camera equipment - mostly larger bulky items (like other camera bags, less expensive accessories, etc). In total, the movers prepared 208 separate pieces, which includes the final boxes and furniture for our hose.
This used to be part of my photography studio - now it's is a holding place for the wrapped items that will transit to the UK. Somewhere in this pile is all the camera equipment I couldn't manage to carry on my person for the trip.
Shortly thereafter, the next round of movers arrived to load up their trucks. In a giant game of Tetris, they spent 8 hours moving these items into wooden crates and inventorying every item. The wooden crates are cleverly designed to fit inside of commercial shipping containers so they can be loaded onto a ship at the Port of Baltimore before transiting the Atlantic. In total, it took 8 of these large wooden crates to move our entire household effects.
In a crazy game of Tetris, the movers managed to stuff all 208 separate boxes & pieces into these wooden containers. The crates are designed to load straight into a commercial shipping container for maritime shipment to the UK.
Movers staged all of the boxes, weighing over 7,000lbs, outside before loading them into the crates. It took almost 2 trucks to carry all of those boxes away!
After nailing the wooden crates shut, they placed serialized inventory stickers on the outside of the crate to ensure there would be no tampering with our goodies.
The last round of moving came today when a few movers arrived to take away our "Express" shipment. I managed to put a few small pieces of equipment in there - stuff like tripods that are pretty robust - so that I'll have them at my disposal shortly after I arrive.
The next challenge comes in 10 days when we head to the airport and I convince United Airlines that my 26lbs camera backpack is my "personal item"!
Stay tuned for more moving stories over the next few weeks.....