Anyone have ideas about how to ship gear to the Rendezvous? With increasing costs for airlines checked baggage it might be worth comparing shipping costs. The devil is in the details, can gear be shipped to the Atlanta area and held to be picked up?
-moss

Nick sent his gear to Mississippi a couple of years back for the Rendezvous. He may have experience and would be a good source of info since he did the research already.
I assume that I will do it like in the past send the rope and gear in the check up and carry personal stuff with me. Hopefully the gear does not get detoured and get there after three or four days like it happened to my daughter flying from Boston to Austin. She end up in San Antonio and the gear showed up a couple of days later in Harlingen Texas!

If the host campground won't allow you to ship items there...Is there a Mail Boxes Etc. store in the area? If so, you can have items UPS'd there for pick up. Also, for the minimal charge ($18-35) it might be worth looking into a post office box in Atlanta. You just have to ship via USPS then. I know some people who shipped adventure racing gear when we went out to Utah, and it worked pretty well. If you're staying in a hotel, most will allow you to ship items there too.

The danger of loosing control of my gear is offset by the cost of paying the airlines bounty.

When some arbo friends of mine from Denmark came over to climb in California a few years ago I UPS'd my portaledge and Treeboats to Eureka. they ended up spending the weekend in Fresno and we spent the weekend sleeping on the ground

I get tight-jawed when I'm told that I'm two pounds overweight, well, attually, my luggage. When I point out the overweight people with huge, but underweight, luggage, I ask why the airlines don't have a scale for the passenger and all gear to weigh. Until then I have to shuffle gear or tear pages off the book I'm reading Not really

Thanks for posting this question, Moss. Simpsonwood has agreed to give us a room where we can store gear shipped ahead of time for the 'Vous. I'll give more details about this in future communications.

Folks who have a question about logistics can always write the TCI office. I'll post it along with an answer.

Thanks~~

Patty J.
Rendezvous Coordinator

pattyjenkins wrote:
Thanks for posting this question, Moss. Simpsonwood has agreed to give us a room where we can store gear shipped ahead of time for the 'Vous. I'll give more details about this in future communications.

Folks who have a question about logistics can always write the TCI office. I'll post it along with an answer.

Thanks~~

Patty J.
Rendezvous Coordinator

That's great! So that takes care of the difficult part, incoming gear. At the end of the 'vous all a traveler would need to do is get their gear to a shipping place (UPS, Mail Boxes Etc. or something like that). Who knows maybe UPS can be convinced to do a special pickup at Simpsonwood after the last climber is out of the trees.

Would be really nice not to have to wrestle with gear through the airports.
-moss