Need some help about moving back to states

Call Tropical Shipping. They can arrange for you to ship your belongings back to Miami on one of their cargo ships that comes through STX each week. You can arrange to collect everything in Miami or have it picked up by a trucking or moving company and sent onwards to your final destination.

This post is about moving from STT. Are you moving from STT or STX?

It is a pain and I would never do it again. I would sell sell sell. 🙂 $10,000, gray hair (started with brown), and anxiety out the... later, we have our stuff. We used Bob Lynch who used Crowley. I suggest trying Tropical and dealing directly with them rather than the middle man as we ended up doing all the paperwork, footwork, calling ,faxing, paying, etc ourselves. Chances are you will not see your stuff and vehicle for 60 days. Customs holds the vehicles for reasons unknown other than money and customs most likely will label your household things as a 'matter of concern of which will be held for intensive scrutiny'. Try to get everything in writing, hire a customs broker for vehicle and household goods, and pack your things with lots of padding and tightly. Your vehicle may sit in one spot for more than a month so make sure your battery is new and you bring a charger with you to pick it up. We have a Ford vehicle with a anti- theft key. If yours is similar, bring another key with you when you pick it up as they completely broke the one that went with our truck. It took a Ford dealership 8 hours to figure out the problem and get us another key.

We had to put our household stuff in a 20' crate that was eventually delivered to our door. You may want to ask if you can ship just singular items somehow, it may be cheaper and quicker.

All in all, I wish you good luck. We did know of a couple that had few items to ship back to Boston and used Bob Lynch with no problem, so you may get lucky... Just allow an extra week on top of what they tell you to get your personal stuff in a crate. We ended up flying out of STT (couldn't change the tickets for five people) while our stuff was still being loaded on a crate from our home on STT.

Please come back and post and let us know the good and bad of moving from STT. It will help the next person to have a less stressful move for sure!

Teresa

Thank you for all your information. I am really concerned about all the hoops I have to go through with the Government just to get my car off the Island. I have very few household goods and is the 20 size container the smallest you can get? Really appreciate all the help on the board and will keep you updated. Yes I am leaving STT and plan to pick up in Miami.

Good luck moving,

Just to clarify, customs only held up our things and our truck on the mainland. Everything seemed to have shipped from STT just fine, but with no communication from the shipping companies to us. I am still in disbelief that we did get all our things here, but others had the same story and got their things as well. I honestly haven't heard of anyone never getting their things, but they may not have a computer to type on... Sigh. Does anyone have a great moving off island story?

Teresa

you can usually ship items by the pallet if you don't have enough for a full container. You pay by the cubic foot and the shipping company generally puts your pallets into a container with other people's small loads. You can then either pick up your own stuff at the other end or have a trucking company pick up your pallets to deliver to you. It's called "LTL" trucking for "less than load" quantities.

Everyone here has giving you some very good information. If you need future asistance you can try Lee Fleming at Managed Freight.