UAB

Woo Hoo!  UAB stands for Unacompanied Air Baggage, which is the shipment that goes by airplane.  It can take anywhere for 3 weeks to 2 months to get to you, but it is infinitely faster than the stuff that goes by boat.  Ours arrived today, after an unintended couple of week stopover in Gabarone, Botswana.  We sent it a few weeks early so that it would synch up with our arrival, but that didn’t work out when the shippers mixed everything up and sent it Gabarone instead of Lesotho.  Go figure.  Anyway, our UAB had all kinds of goodies that I was pleased to see – a half gallon of pure maple syrup, boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese, and some board games, and on and on.

Six.  Six, beautiful, wonderful boxes, ha... ha... ha...

It goes without saying that it was annoying for our stuff to be lost in Gabarone, but I have to give some credit to my boss, the Management Officer, and the shipping company.  It turns out that the shipping company has not been so reliable of late, and so my boss sent them a nastygram via email when they couldn’t locate our stuff.  As a result, the company agreed to let us buy some of the essential stuff that we needed that were in the shipment, things like Josephine’s booster seat, several boxes of diapers, nearly all of our winter clothes, and the humidifiers.  We were able to run out to Bloemfontein last weekend and get what we needed, and the shippers will reimburse us for our trouble.  Good on you, Atlantic Relocation Systems.

How much UAB you are allowed is determined by how big your family is.  A single traveler gets 250 pounds.  I forget what the formula is, but as a family of 4, we were allowed 700 pounds.  Preparing it can be a pretty tricky balancing act.  You want to get as close to your limit as possible without going over, because they charge you an outragreous amount of money if you go over.  I am happy to say that we were able to get 690 pounds into our UAB, which means that if you add our baggage (roughly 500 lbs) and out UAB together, we have enough from home to ease the transition.  It’ll be nice when we get settled into the new house (possibly next weekend)  and we get the rest of our stuff, but I am pretty sure we can live with what we have for now.

Mordecai and Wilson enjoying the blankets from the UAB shipment.