DR moving saga

jackieboo

On Vaction without a return ticket!
Mar 18, 2006
362
0
0
Well we?re here!

As many of you on the board know I?ve been planning my move to the DR for some time. Well the day finally arrived and I?m in my house and here?s our little saga getting here.

First off, if at possible, move in the winter. We had a complicated situation. Having 3 rather large dogs that accompanied us on the journey took a considerable amount of planning. We moved from Arizona and because of the mean temperatures in August around the United States commercial airlines have an embargo on transporting dogs in cargo. After searching for weeks and researching every possible avenue our only option was to drive to Miami and ship the dogs on a perishable goods cargo flight to the DR. Yes you read that right we had to drive our dogs to Miami from Arizona.

Everything was going our way in the beginning. Our container came and left on time, our house sold in record time, our cars went in days and all in all mother karma seemed to be smiling on our move. I rented a minivan to transport us and the dogs, $400.00 for a week including the drop off in Miami, I booked us at pet friendly hotels along the way and we gave ourselves plenty of time to get to Miami. Plenty of time until Ernesto showed his ugly little head. We were in Mobile Alabama when the cargo company called and told us they had cancelled all of their flights for the week we intended on flying. That meant a delay of 6 days. Luckily we had friends in North Carolina so we detoured up to visit them for 3 days and then swung back down to Miami.

The day of our flight to the DR finally arrives. We?ve packed 6 giant suitcases with a ton of electronic goods. I bought a 20? LCD T.V. at Best Buy for $275.00 before we left as well as we had 3 computers and God knows what else. I?ll be working from here and tele-commuting so I needed most of the electronic equipment. We had talked to a lot of our friends here and most of them had no issues with customs on arrival and if there was an issue 500 Pesos normally took care of the situation. I don?t know if many of you have flown in to the Santiago airport recently however they now x-ray ALL of the luggage entering the country. Can you guess who got pulled aside?

Long story short I lost the LCD T.V. (I believe the customs supervisor found it) and we got to leave without any taxes being paid.

The dogs got delayed by 15 hours and stopped in Venezuela on the way. I didn?t even get a tee-shirt.

After 3 hours and 400,000 carbon papers later we left the customs office with our dogs only to get lost in Santiago. Two more hours and we arrived here at our new home.

Since then I?ve spent ? a day getting cable boxes (I have one and the other will be available on Monday, right?), 4 hours buying another television and a full day in Moca looking at cars.

A giant thank you to Richard and Chris for making my connection issues no issue at all!

Thank God I start working on Monday!
 

POP Bad Boy

Bronze
Jun 27, 2004
984
30
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..........that's terrible..............

.............losing your TV to the customs supervisor.............that stuff happens all the time here....................AND IT NEVER SEEMS TO END.!

.....OH, and good luck!