Vacation time once again, which means, do I pay out the nose to take my bike on the plane or do I ship it? The past few years I’ve shipped with Bikeflights  and have had very good results. I have a large hard case that I bought for a song from a friend that sits in my attic until times like this, where I want to fly to a destination but not pay with a kidney. The Bikeflights site makes it quite easy, especially if you know the dimensions of your box/case and have a rough idea of what the overall weight will be. Enter the data and you’ll be given a list of Fed-Ex options, from Ground (cheapest), all the way to Next Day Air ( requires that kidney I alluded to earlier, might as well take on a plane,)

My quotes were from $40 to almost $300. $40 would get it there in 3 days, and since that was more than adequate, I went with Ground. Insurance will cost you about a dollar per hundred, so $1000 = $10. If you want them to pick it up at your location it’s an extra $5 and if you want it delivered to a residential address, you get an added fee of $5 as well. Dropping it off at a Fed-Ex Office location is easy enough, but I will get hit with the $5 for the return trip home. All-in-all, it was right at $100 for my trip. That’s a $200 savings over the luggage fees from an airline, and like I said before, the 3 days without that bike isn’t a big deal. Members of USAC can save an additional $5 per leg, by using the link listed in the “Benefits” section on the USAC site/app.

The first leg: Arkansas to New York. I dropped it off on a Tuesday and Bikeflights sent me an email saying that Fed-Ex had accepted my package and it included all the tracking information. That following Friday, I received another email letting me know the package had been delivered. I arrived in NY the next day and my bike was waiting for me. There was no visible damage to the case (it’s ABS plastic, so I’d hope not) and upon inspection all the contents were accounted for and nothing had rubbed, bent, or broken.

Yay bikes! Now for 10 days of gravel solitude in the foothills of the Adirondacks.