The Grand Tour Continued, at least for our package

One of the things that we’ve learned about our travel mode, is that we need to keep things light so that we can make those public transit connections on time and carry our own bags up the narrow flights of stairs that seem to always be present in the great places we stay. As we travel, we do tend to gather piles of new information, cool gifts and personal items, and find out that some of our careful packing just wasn’t needed. The solution for all of these things is to get a box and pack all such items up and send them back home. Not cheap, but it is hard to put a price on having space in your luggage again and being able to pick those bags up for boarding or rough pavement. This great plan has worked well for several trips now and saved us much in the way of time, effort, and aching backs.

Unfortunately, the large box we mailed to Elle from Portland Maine never made it there. Well it did sort of but due to a zipcode mistake (last digit off by one) our large package entered into a loop between two local post offices and a postal distribution center in West Sacramento. This went on for at least a week as we tried to catch up with the package. We were running out of ideas when a call came in this morning from one post office telling us that the missing package was going to the other post office. We dashed over only to find it wasn’t there but might be out for delivery. We took turns camping out at Elle’s until the mail man arrived this afternoon. He went back and looked and sure enough the package was there and looking not too bad for all the extra travel and bumps it picked up.

We had a great time discovering all the good stuff and old clothes waiting inside. It was a great reminder of all the places we visited and some excellent xmas gifts that will be shared after all. We got some great help in spite of a system that could use some updating. I know a lot more than I ever wanted about package delivery now.

Whew!

Who knew one little digit could cause such a hassle

Not shown on this list is the time the package spent in southern California waiting for a new label. It got one but that had a zipcode error too…