Ticking Boxes
December 2022 to November 2023
Eero Saarinen’s modernist monolith, complete with a gilded eagle, that leitmotif of American supremacy, has dominated the west side of Grosvenor Square in Mayfair since 1960. This is London's premier neighbourhood, as anyone who has played Monopoly knows.
‘Little America’ was the world’s first purpose-built embassy and remained a symbol of post-war, US might until 2018 when the Obama government flogged it off. The buyer was a Qatari retail and hotel developer and the price, a rumoured £500 million. It’s a sad reflection on the emerging world order when industrial might makes way for a petro-dollar funded temple to shopping and shagging but maybe that’s age speaking…
And while the sum sounds like a lot, Mayfair is thought to host a fair proportion of London’s twenty or so £100 million private houses. It’s easy to see why Donald Trump, in a moment of rare lucidity, dubbed it “the worst real-estate deal in history”. It’s been reported that construction costs were higher than the estimate to refit this landmark, making the decision to sell it off more questionable.
The new United States embassy is at Nine Elms, near Vauxhall on the southside of the Thames. It’s the kind of building that very successful companies that do very boring things, very well, erect for themselves to show how current they are. In fairness, it’s quite distinguished in a hyper-tech, anodyne way. Moated by a lake on three sides, it looks much better suited to represent a modest, Scandinavian faux-socialist paradise than a swaggering, first-among-equals, superpower.
Regardless, anybody wanting to visit the USA for tourism or healthcare reasons for more than ninety consecutive days must get a B1/B2 visa. This means a trip over the river to attend a pre-arranged appointment, having first completed an exhaustive questionnaire and handed over $160.
Although I didn't need it for over a year, the embassy website recommends applying well in advance. As visas are valid for ten years if granted, it’s probably worth the hassle and I didn’t want to start detailed planning only to find I would need to cram the journey into three months or less.
As instructed, I presented myself promptly on 22 December 2022 at 09:30 to find that about 2,000 other people had been given precisely the same instruction. If this is a typical day (and it is, apparently), this means 500,000 people each year will need to endure nearly six hours of queuing, three security checks, and two perfunctory interviews to get assessed.
But although the process is slow, it does work as advertised. So after confirming I didn’t intend to do any paid work to fund my trip and handing my passport over, the application was approved and my visa granted, valid until 19 December 2032.
After the debacle with Brown Motorsports, I set about investigating how to ship a motorcycle to Florida and back again. The internet is not awash with such services, but a useful article on Bennett’s Insurance website contained links to Janes Worldwide Shipping and Moto Freight. Both are based near Heathrow and gave similar advice: send it out by air and return by ship.
The logic is that air freight gives a high degree of certainty for when your bike will arrive, with the only risk being some emergency shipment of medicines or similar will cause your consignment to get bumped. Even if this did happen,, the chances are it would be following a day later, such is the volume of freight between Heathrow and Orlando.
In terms of return shipment, the recommended port is Savannah, Georgia. This was on the list of places to visit in any event, on the advice of pal Richard who rates the eating and drinking there very highly indeed. Although I would not be quite completing the circle back to Florida, the last stretch back to Port St. Lucie didn’t offer much other than Cape Canaveral, which I’d seen twenty-five years earlier during a once-only family holiday to Disneyland when my children were young.
Return shipment is an altogether more leisurely affair. You drop your bike off and it gets put in a container marked ‘UK’. When the container fills up, they put it on a ship. It then turns up in Southhampton or Harwich about four weeks later. All in all, my expectations were set that I would kiss goodbye to it for between three and four months, by which time, I anticipated being glad to see the back of it for a while.
Indicative costs were similar for both companies. Building a crate around it, air freight, insurance plus the services of a customs agent in the US came to about £2,600, with return by sea at £1,650.
At £4,250 all in, it’s more expensive than my Virgin Atlantic Upper Class return ticket, so came as a bit of a surprise. However, the alternative of buying a new bike and selling it back to the dealer carried with it a premium of about $10,000. So it’s still a useful saving but not quite as much as I’d hoped. The invisible hand of the market is always on my shoulder in these situations, dark forces seeming to set prices at precisely the highest level I’m prepared to pay when comparing the alternatives.
Of all the available services, the only remotely discretionary one is that of the customs agent. This was estimated at a hefty £500 or thereabouts and seemed a lot considering they work entirely online. Both shippers convinced me easily to pay up. Unlike me, the agents know exactly how the system works, t paperwork is required at each step of the process, and won’t put up with any crap from a port authority flunkey who’s had a bad day. Again, the invisible hand is there. The total customs bill ended up being closer to a £1,000 but probably still worth it as the process seems opaque and labyrinthine.
Enquiries also revealed the existence of a scheme whereby the US Environmental Protection Agency grant a temporary exemption for a potentially non-confirming (i.e. one they haven’t tested) vehicle. This is mandatory for all temporary imports, but a relatively painless process providing it’s followed to the letter. So sixteen days after applying, I received formal notification of an exemption number together with conditions that apply. The key ones are not selling it to a local and promising to ship it back within twelve months of importing it.
Insurance was next and this is a game of two halves. For the bike itself, like shipping, there is almost a complete dearth of providers. Eventually, I found Motorcycle Express. Their website is a treasure-trove of Byzantium details for foreign motorcyclists, even covering the complexities of riding in Canada. This involves a separate ID Card, printed on special paper and mailed to you in the UK.
At $1135 (about £900) for six months of cover, the policy overall is a goodly sum compared to the £385 I pay to insure the same bike in the London-Essex hinterland, where thievery is rife and driving standards are abysmal.
But then again, the mileage anyone else taking out this policy is likely to cover in six months is likely to be three or four times the annual UK average. This means exposure to the biggest and potentially most expensive risks (accidents and subsequent medical treatment) increases proportionately. Couple this with the USA’s famously litigious culture and it’s probably reasonable value but a big upfront expense for something I hope not to use. You also get emergency assistance and recovery thrown in as well.
In terms of protecting body and soul, that’s slightly easier but not by much. I bank with one of the four ‘High Street’ banks and get 90 days of travel insurance included in the monthly account fee I pay them. This can be extended by up to a year for an additional premium. Usefully, it covers motorcycling on machines above 125cc but stipulates it must be the primary means of transport for the holiday, including all segments from home and back again.
I called to query this, pointing out that the only way I could comply with the minutiae of the policy terms would be to take a six-and-a-half-thousand-mile detour across Russia to Chukotka, before braving a sixty-mile ferry across the Bering Strait to Alaska. As it would be February, most of the route would also be iced over, although this may have cleared by summer when I would repeat the exercise to return home…
The combination of weather, distance and geo-political tensions would - I reasoned - materially increase the risk they would be taking on. Would not my preferred alternative of flying there and back with the bike going separately (and being insured by someone else) be better for both of us?
Did they accept this reasoned argument? At first, did they f***. Zero understanding of the points I made and no commercial nous or common sense. Carol Beer, the disinterested and negative Jobsworth lackey with a perpetual cold and default response of “Computer says No” from the now much-derided ‘Little Britain’ lives on…
So a separate policy looked like the only option. Specialist motorcycling broker Carole Nash had the best one I could find but at a hefty £631.78 that went up to over £1,000 after the disclosure of a neck operation, over twenty years ago.. The comparison sites threw up cheaper alternatives but closer inspection revealed they all contained restrictions rendering them not fit for purpose.
Out of curiosity, I called the bank back a few days later and got a much more sensible and sympathetic response. Once the underwriter had understood the dynamics of this particular situation, they waived the ‘primary means of transport’ clause and a more reasonable additional premium of £372.60 was quoted and accepted.
I do find it unnerving when insurance companies are so inconsistent in their approach to rates and terms. It’s the same when policies become due for renewal: wildly different premiums are quoted by the same companies, depending on the price comparison site. It’s as if they are making everything up as they go along…
By far the biggest task was accommodation. Originally, I thought to book a rolling ten days in advance but a few random searches of various destinations quickly disabused me of the notion.
Even nine months in advance, some of the most popular destinations (Key West, Grand Canyon & Provincetown, for example) were showing very limited availability with many properties requiring full payment in advance. Often, this was paired with a ‘no refunds’ policy for cancellation or minimal flexibility to change.
Some of the more remote locations I had selected based on distance had nowhere to stay at all. A recalibration of all routes followed, balancing distance with the availability of overnight lodging, before booking each stop in chronological order.
Many hoteliers loathe Booking.com, pointing out that they were always full, before the advent of this site, and bemoaning the commission they have to pay when visitors use it. It’s a constant surprise then, to find that it’s often the only reservation method available. Even when it’s not, incentives are rarely offered for booking directly.
Net-net is Booking.com works for both supplier and customer and makes for an efficient market: the hotels don’t need to invest in marketing or reservations systems and the customer gets a consistent experience for arranging and modifying bookings.
Importantly, credit card details - although never 100% safe online - are only stored on one site rather than on nearly a hundred in this case. All that’s needed now is for small-minded hoteliers not to ‘punish’ customers who use Booking.com by giving them the lousiest room, on the highest floor, as far as possible from the lift. If they don’t like the service or don’t need it, they just shouldn’t use it.
Contrast this passive aggression with my telephone inquiry for a twin-bedded room in Napa Valley a few years ago. The ‘boutique’ B&B owner cooed: “Ledme zee… eh ken uffer yoo a pair of large queens!” complete with brightly rising cadence and accommodating in every sense of the word.
Although Booking.com might lack individual charm and the personal touch, it ticks the boxes marked efficiency, security, and convenience. Given the scale of the task, this is what I was after.
So setting myself a target of two or three destinations a day, all reservations were made by the end of September 2022. At the very least, if I did need to change dates, I would know where I was aiming for.
So that’s it: everything booked and planned as far as possible: over & out from me until March 2024.
It’s now just a question of actually doing it…