That's a wrap

The car finally made it to Atlanta, and I've been enjoying it for the last couple days. In total, it took 8 weeks and 5 days for it to get from Nice, France to Atlanta, Georgia, broken down thusly:

• 10 days to get picked up from Nice
  
• 7 days to get loaded onto the boat
  
• 20 days to cross the Atlantic
  
• 7 days to go through CBP
  
• 14 days to go through the Vehicle Distribution Center
  
• 3 days to be delivered to my dealer
  

But the agony is finally over now and the car fits like a glove. The car cover from my last car even fits (albeit not very well) so I can keep it clear of the oak worm poo and sap from the oak tree in my driveway.

A reunion in the making?

Got word today that my car was declared "ready to ship" and should get here sometime early this week. Finally!

Now we have proof this vacation actually happened...

Been working on culling down my 1151 pictures and here's what I thought were the ones that fairly represented our trip.

Photo Gallery

Oh, the "Don Juan," the ship carrying Heike across the pond, is now in the open ocean heading to Halifax, NS, then New York, and finally Brunswick, GA on July 1. W00t!

Homeward bound

So it looks like Heike will be loaded onto the slow boat tomorrow and should arrive in the U.S. and A. on July 1. There's still basically no chance of getting it before the 4th, but I should have it the week after.

W00t! W00t!

The long road home

So it would appear that "Heike" sat under the Riviera sun for about 10 days before starting her trip home this morning.

First stop is Bremerhaven, which is ~1400km from Nice. Let's hope the truck driver has a better reason to get there than simply unloading a bunch of cars.

This delay pretty much ensures that I will not take redelivery before the 4th of July weekend, and will likely push the redelivery time out into the 7-8 week timeframe.

How soon is too soon to call?

I feel like a guy who had a great date with a girl who's waiting for enough time to pass before calling her so he doesn't seem desperate. This phase is easily the worst part of the whole European Delivery process. You've had a little taste of your new UDM and now you have to wait in limbo until you can get whatever morsels of information that dribble out about where it is, which ship it's going to be on, when that ship is supposed to cross the pond, how long it's going to be stuck in customs. It's absolute torture. #firstworldpains

On a lighter note, I feel completely overwhelmed going through my 1100 photos. I just got through importing them all into Adobe Lightroom and have geotagged and applied basic keywords and post-processing steps to them. I think I am going to have to just go one day at a time and be ruthless about which shots make the first cut. I got a new monitor to help out with navigating through the pics and tweaking them and I think that will speed up the process a fair bit.

If I can't be in Italy, I'll let Italy come to me

So we found out that Target sells gelato imported from Italy under their "Archer Farms" label. Guess what? They have a "combo pack" of pineapple and coconut. Yes, you heard correctly. I can now have pineapple and coconut gelato whenever I want. Schwing!