Shipping three motorcycles across the Atlantic is not cheap. So in an effort to save a few bucks, we decided to try and build our own shipping crates for our motorcycles. Yes, we told a little white lie to the shipping company…”Yeah, it’s cool, Rodger works for a shipping company and builds crates to ship Kayaks.” Well, he does work part time for a kayak shipping company and he does see plenty of crates, but none of us had ever attempted to build one. Surprisingly, we were given the go ahead from the shipping company and so we headed to the lumber warehouse.

I like to believe that we are well prepared for this trip, but my god were we lacking in the shipping department. Without blueprints or even a sketch, Rodger recalled dimensions from his head as we walked to the counter. We figured we could cut corners again by salvaging some “slightly used” wood that my Dad had sitting under a project car in his garage. By noon we started cutting and hammering. We ended up with floors, walls, and tops for three crates but were then faced with the problem of how to transport them to the shipyard. My Jeep has no brakes, Rodgers truck is broken, and Andrew drives a Volkswagen Golf. Three assembled crates would require a flat bed truck to move them and we sure did not want to fork over the money to rent one. We ended up just riding the bikes to the shipping company, but we were required to ship them empty of all oil and gas. We took care of this problem in the parking lot with a siphon, oil pan, and some empty juice bottles. Our buddy hauled the stacked-up and tied-down crate pieces to the shipyard in his little Toyota truck. As the big rig truckers pulled into the loading dock, they stared at our obviously homemade, half-assembled boxes. They watched with various puzzled expressions while we franticly nailed the crates together around our motorcycles to meet our quickly approaching 4 o'clock deadline. We hammered the last few nails into the crates just before the deadline rolled around, scribbled “London Motorcycle”, “Fragile”, and “This Side Up” onto all of the crates. Hot and tired, Andrew and I sat on top of his crated bike and just gave each other a nod. We watched as the forklift came down the ramp toward the first crate and laughed when we saw Rodger write “supafly” on the side of his crate. We all winced as the forklift slammed into my crate and took it away by sliding it across the floor. We can only hope they will still be in one piece when they arrive in London.