Intime Logo
As promised, there will be a couple of dedicated post on Rocinante and how to ship her and all our gear to Wellington. The first step was to figure out how to ship the bike and find a forwarding agent.
A couple of Internet searches and inquiries later, one company stood out: InTime Motorradtransporte Hamburg. Behind this impressive name is Olaf. He was exceptionally helpful, and offered the best price for air freight.
Why via air? One week! that is how long it took the bike to get to NZ. On top of that, the price difference melts significantly, if you calculate all the additional coasts of sea freight in (harbour fee, handling fee, that-guys-sisters-wedding fee …).
I am absolutely fine with repeating myself: Olaf was of amazing help. The kind of honourable business man one wishes to encounter far more often. So, logistics was covered (or that was what I thought until our own departure on the following Friday). I paid about 2000 € for the whole trip, FRA to WLG, insurance included.
The crate
blueprint
After the logistics were sorted and Olaf patiently answered my questions about the dos and don’ts, it was time to look around and find out how to build a crate. Fortunately, it was a very short search. I found two independent German sites of other travellers once facing the same problem.
They are a great resource and everything I needed. With their insight, all we needed was the dimensions of my Transalp, with a good estimate guess on how much we could reduce that, once all the unnecessary part were taken off. With the help of my family, one of my uncles in particular, it took us less than an hour.
Finding a place to acquire the materials was a little bit more troublesome. After I visited the first two hardware stores I found out that, to my astonishment, the prices differed greatly. So I switched to the phone instead, and filled my little excel spreadsheet (yes, I work in IT … does it show?) and did the math. The prices varied between 170 € and 300 € for all the necessary materials. I’ve ordered all the stuff and they cut it exactly to my measurements. All it would need to assemble it was some glue and screws.
The next Friday, in the middle of moving all our stuff from the flat to the storage, we took the rented van out to the hardware store and picked up the pre-cut pieces. Now we needed a full free day to do the actual work …
