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Experiences taking our bikes to France May2010 via Delta (1 Articles)
2 Jun 2010   Rick Randall (mx51g@yahoo.com)
KeyWords: Airlines, Boxes, Storage, Europe, France, Paris, Loire, valley, Provence
France 1) Delta carried our two touring bikes and charged us $1100 round trip for that service. You really want to include the price of baggage surcharges when you are shopping for a flight.
2) We used two boxes to carry the bikes. Originally I was going to get cardboard boxes from a bike shop and use that to ship, but when I saw today's cardboard boxes for bikes are made of very low burst strength carboard, I bought two shipping boxes. One was a corplast box from Colorado Cyclist which is like a plastic version of a cardboard box. The other was a ProBike ABS plastic shipping case with wheels and an internal frame. We bought both used for $50 each, since we live in Denver where a lot of this stuff is available. I found I could not properly pack the Colo Cyclist box with both wheels, so put three wheels in the ProBike case and one in the Colo Cyclist case. I was delighted to find in Paris that the Colo Cyclist box could fit inside the ProBike case after the bikes were removed. We incurred no damage to the bikes.
3) We flew open jaw (into France at Paris, out from Nice). This meant we had to somehow get the boxes from Paris to Nice so we could use them to ship the bikes back. We spent 114 Euro with Sernam to have them shipped and the hotel we had booked in Nice was kind enough to receive the box and hold it for us during the three weeks we were on our tour.
4) Getting these boxes around from the airport to our hotels and whatnot was a challenge due to their size. We were successful in getting them on the RER train from CDG airport to the nearest train stop near our hotel in Paris. We then ended up reverting to simply rolling the ProBike case down the sidewalk on its wheels to get it where we needed to go. In a couple of cases that meant several kilometers of sidewalk travel (like when we were going from the hotel to the airport in Nice), but it worked out surprisingly well.

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