Reunited With Our Harley's

Whoever said US Customs Officers can appear 'scary' and 'unhelpful' at times to us foreign visitors were wrong!   We woke early, excited to be collecting our bikes today from a bonded warehouse near Orlando International Airport.  However, we first had to deal with US Customs and effectively 'import' our motorcycles.  After getting a taxi to their offices via a Home Depot to buy a hammer and crow-bar ('wrecking-bar' in American) to be used later to get the bikes out of their crates we arrived at around 9am.  Get this, by 9:20am all paperwork was completed by the most helpful Officer we had ever met in all our travels to the USA.  To top it all he even phoned up on our behalf a representative from Virgin Atlantic Cargo and talked them into driving the 3 miles to pick us up and take us back to their warehouse.  What fantastic service!

At Virgin Atlantic Cargo we completed all remaining paperwork and paid our $50 import duty and within 15 minutes of arriving our crates were being delivered to us.

Jon soon set to work dismantling the crates with brute force and gusto aided by an electric screwdriver lent to us by the warehouse staff and the hammer and wrecking-bar from Home Depot, thus saving ourselves some $800 in forward agency services by this DIY approach! 

Finally  at around 12:15pm we were OFF!  Riding our bikes for the very first time on American soil.  We headed back to the hotel and within 15 minutes of leaving Virgin Atlantic Cargo Centre we ran into the most incredible tropical rain storm.  The rain was coming down so hard and so dense we literally could not see a thing.  It was indeed a very scary experience to be having 15 minutes into our American Road 'riding career!'  We pulled off the road almost immediately into a office parking lot and sheltered in a doorway.  We were so wet that had we jumped in the hotel swimming pool with all our clothes on we would probably have got out of the pool dryer than we now were huddled in the office entrance!  We did note the size of the Florida storm-drains, they were huge and looked like they could have consumed the flow of the River Thames back in London.  Now we know why!