Bag Storage

[Twilkins9076]

My wife and I are riding the western half of the Trans-AM this summer on our coupled tandem.  We will be flying into Pueblo, and finishing in Portland, and the one logistic problem I'm having trouble getting a handle on is what to do with our bike bags (other than shipping them home and having them shipped to us in Portland when we finish). 

Ideally, I would like to ship them directly to Portland so they will be waiting for us there so we can check the bike as luggage on the flight home versus boxing and shipping it.  Unfortunately, the bike hostels and cycling friendly hotels I've contacted cannot accommodate holding our bags for our arrival. 

I'm wondering if someone out there has found a solution to this in the Portland area and could pass that information along?

Worst case, we could either double ship the travel cases or have the tandem boxed and shipped home, but both of those are a bit more expensive than being able to fly with it as standard luggage.

Thanks in advance, and I'm hoping we can meet on the road!

[BikeliciousBabe]

Don't know about the storage part, but have you looked at bikeflights.com in the event you ultimately have to ship?

[John Nelson]

Don't rule out boxing the bikes and taking them with you on both flights (throwing the outbound box away in Pueblo). There's a reason why this option is selected by so many touring cyclists. It's often the simplest and most economical choice, if you use an airline that doesn't charge an arm and a leg for a bicycle.

[Twilkins9076]

Thanks guys....Bikeflights is definitely the cheapest option if we do have to ship the bags.  As for boxing, the tandem draws a huge amount of attention when it's boxed as a tandem, and if we break it into two boxes, we end up with double the charges.  Based on past experiences with it, we've come out way ahead using it's suitcases where it travels as normal checked luggage, but those past experiences have involved a flight in and out of the same location and a hotel that would store them for us because we had two sets of reservations confirmed before I asked the question.

I've thought about making a reservation with a hotel knowing that it would have to change before calling to see if that would sway their minds in our favor. 

I hadn't considered the warm showers option....that's probably worth pursuing.

[Ty0604]

Ship them to a UPS Access Point. Go to the website below and type in the zip code of the hotel you’re staying in. Send them to the closest place to there.

https://www.ups.com/us/en/services/individual-shipper/ups-access-point-deliveries.page