Tag Archives: shipping

Putting All of Your Stuff in Someone Else’s Hands

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The process of getting yourself from one part of the world to another is not terribly complex. Get a plane ticket, pack some bags and off you go. However, airlines are quite fussy about how much you take with you on a plane and don’t want to include all of your possessions in your luggage allowance. To fully move 5,000 miles and across an ocean, you need an alternative. That means loading all of your stuff up in a shipping container, sending it across the ocean and hoping it doesn’t drop off a ship on the way. The first step is having the shipping company come and pack everything up. Our street was not suitable for bringing in a 40’ ISO container so they loaded a couple of trucks up to take everything to their site for transfer to the container.

The smaller trucks came on the first day when the crew showed up with the packing material to get everything packed up ready to go. The second day was the loading and packing any remaining items. The bigger trucks were needed for the loading. They were really efficient about packing the items into the truck to minimise space used. Quite a game of Tetris, I imagine. Then the doors get closed, and a truck drives off with almost all of your belongings in it. Fingers crossed you see it all again!

Hiram M Chittenden Locks

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Just north of the center of Seattle is Ballard.  Aside from being an interesting area with shops, bars and restaurants, it is also home to a set of locks that connect the salt waters of Puget Sound with Lake Union and Lake Washington’s fresh waters.  The locks are the busiest in the US with a steady stream of traffic.  On the weekend, this is heavily dominated by pleasure craft but commercial vessels are also a big feature.  Indeed, while we were there, we found out that there is a hierarchy of which types of vessel get to go through first, even if some of the owners of the small pleasure craft were not up to speed on the rules!

The locks are named after the man who was instrumental in the early phases of their construction.  Aside from leading a big construction project, he also was quite visionary in other areas but that will be the topic of another post soon.  There are actually two locks.  One is a small lock that suits pleasure craft or small commercial vessels.  The other is far broader and longer and can be operated with a middle set of gates if less vessels are coming through.  It can also take a lot of smaller boats wedged together like a giant game of Tetris when demand is high such as is the case on warm holiday weekends.

The locks are open to the public along with a small botanic garden.  You can cross over the top of the gates (although these are rather narrow and can get congested when people decide to stop and hang around rather than keep moving).  There is plenty of space along the sides of the locks to watch the boats as they come in and as they rapidly rise or fall when the water levels are adjusted.  We obviously weren’t the only ones to find it a relaxing spot to hang out for a while.