The First Hurdle – Shipping Our Truck

The first week of November was a major milestone for our trip! After much work and stress, we shipped our truck and camper from Houston to Buenos Aires! This shipping process started 3 months ago and has been a pain ever since. Finding a shipping company that understood what we needed proved to be a much harder endeavor than anticipated. Reaching out to shipping companies usually went one of two ways:

1) We would email and call the company explaining our year plan and that we needed to ship our truck with the camper in the bed along with all our gear. After fully describing our situation the response would be to expect a quote in the next couple of days. For 70% of the companies we reached out to, no quote arrived and the communication stopped there.

2) For another 20% of companies, the response was: “We don’t understand your shipping needs and do not feel comfortable shipping your truck.”

Our shipping breakthrough came when I reached out the Ship Overseas. Almost immediately they understood our plan and were willing to work with us to find the best way to ship our truck.

From our own research, we learned there are two main ways to ship a truck: in a 20 foot shipping container or via a roll-on roll-off (RO-RO) method. The container method is the most secure since only our truck would be sealed in the container. Also, this method allowed us to keep all our gear in the truck. The RO-RO method involves driving the truck onto the ship and securing it in an on-board parking lot. This method is cheaper than the container but is less secure and would require the truck and camper to be completely empty. After much discussion of cost and feasibility with Ship Overseas we settled on the container method due to being able to ship our gear with the truck. So after about 2 months of shopping for shipping companies, we finally had a shipping date booked! We had to have the truck in Houston on November 6th and the truck would ship on November 17th. We were so relieved to have figured out the shipping fiasco!

Now fast-forward to November 5th. On November 5th we started our long drive to Houston. Both the truck and camper were fully ready for life in South America. We carefully packed away everything we would need for the next 10 months and took off from Fort Collins for Houston at 6:00 am. Our goal was to drive from Fort Collins to Dallas on the 5th and then drive from Dallas to Houston on the 6th to have the truck at the delivery point by noon. The drive to Dallas took us about 16 hours but at 11 pm we pulled into a highway rest stop just outside of Dallas. We spent the night at this rest stop with a bunch of truckers and prepared for the craziness of the following day. We knew we had to complete a few tasks before arriving at the delivery point. We needed to somehow get a certificate from a professional that our two propane tanks were empty and disconnected and to throughly wash the truck. The propane certificate turned out to be a huge headache because has anyone heard of needed a certificate for an empty propane tank?!

The morning of the 6th, we once again hit the road at 6:00 am and started the last leg of the Houston journey. Once 8:00 am rolled around, we began calling every propane place we could find to see if anyone could certify our tanks were empty. Similar to calling shipping companies, almost every propane place we called was extremely confused at what we wanted. We got responses like: “Why do you want empty tanks,” “We only fill propane tanks,” “It won’t be cost effective to flush out propane tanks.” After receiving 15 different confused answers about empty propane tanks, we decided to head for the delivery location and hope they could help us.

Finally we arrived at our delivery location and were immediately surprised it was not a dock or port or even by the ocean. I guess we thought since the truck is being transported via a ship, we would drop it off at a port. Instead we were greeted with a dusty lot with a couple of shipping containers and a ton of totaled cars. We quickly looked at each other and said, “I really hope our truck doesn’t end up like these cars!”

We drove through the car graveyard to a small trailer we believed was the office. While we waited for any signs of life amongst the vehicular carnage, we gathered the few belongings we needed to take back with us. Finally, a man emerged from the trailer. He looked quite puzzled to see our freshly cleaned truck and in his dusty lot. I quickly told him that we are here to drop off our truck to be shipped to Argentina. I gave him our shipping receipt and to my dismay his puzzled look remained. “I don’t know your company, Ship Overseas,” he finally said. “Can I call them?” In a panic that something was amiss, I called our shipping broker and luckily he picked right up. Our broker talked with our puzzled friend and almost immediately everything was cleared up. I don’t know exactly what the problem was, but I guess that is why we are paying for a broker.

Once the confusion was cleared up another man came with an inspection sheet to record any damages our truck had before being loaded into a container. We gave him the title to the truck and helped him on his inspection. It turned out, we did not need the certificate for the empty propane tanks, he just took our word that they were empty. Once we finished his inspection, he described that he would load the truck into a container and secure the truck but all of this would happen the next day after the truck had fully been processed in their system. So at this point we were told we had done everything we needed to and they would handle everything else. We would have liked to have seen the truck loaded but we trusted they knew what they were doing. So after about 2 hours in the dusty lot, we walked away from our home from the next year. We were so nervous that we wouldn’t see our truck again because we had just left it with two strangers who also had it’s title and key. They need the title for the truck to clear customs and once it does, it will be sent via Fedex to our customs broker in Buenos Aires. So hopefully our truck arrives safely in Buenos Aires but we will have to anxiously wait a month to find out.

Upon exiting the vehicle graveyard we finally noticed our ravenous hunger. To combat this, we took an Uber to the nearest Olive Garden to eat, lament on our life decisions and mentally prepare for our 5:00 am flight back to Denver the next morning.