Shipping Our POV to Germany

Last week, it was time to say "Good-bye" to the Jeep and send it off to Germany.  My friend Jennie also had to ship her car to Hawaii, so we decided to ship our cars at the same time and drive back to Lawton together.  I was really surprised how easy this process actually was.

The shipping VPC was located in Dallas, which is a good 3 hour drive from Lawton.  This presented a problem since Ryan is deployed and wasn't able to follow me to Dallas in order to drive me home.   Jennie and I easily solved this by following each other to Dallas and rented a car to drive back together.  In order to ship your car there are a few things you have to complete: 

1.  The car must be clean inside and out with no personal items remaining in the vehicle. 

2.  Have 4 copies of your orders

3.  A Power of Attorney (if the service member is not present) 

4.  A valid Driver's License 

5.  The car Title and Registration (or approval from lien holder authorizing the shipment)

6.  Ensure the vehicle only contains 1/4th of a tank of gas

We had cleaned out the inside of our vehicles before taking the cars to Dallas, but we wanted to ensure the car was super clean inside and out before going to the VPC.   So, we stopped at a very thorough car wash.  We opted to pay for the $30 was and it looked great so I am super glad we picked that option! It will be like new when we pick it up in Germany!  

Then, we hit a road block.  Jennie had forgot the rule to only have a 1/4th tank of gas remaining in the vehicle and she ended up with a half tank left.  This meant she had to burn another 1/4th tank of gas while I was at the VPC shipping my car.  It was really quite funny, since it took her another two and a half hours to burn that fuel! First, they directed her to a Firestone where they apparently were able to "De-fuel" her vehicle; however, it was a 2 hour wait and would take another 45 minutes to complete the de-fuel, so she decided to drive around revving her engine every five seconds to get the gas gauge to go down.  As she was doing this, she found an old man who offered to siphon the gas from her tank.   After his description of his makeshift methods, she decided that was probably not a good idea and continued to drive around.  She ended up picking me up and we burned some fuel finding the rental car place and picking up the rental car.  By the time we got back to the VPC we were at exactly a 1/4th tank of gas!!  Thank the Lord! I felt so bad because we had made this trip down and I swore she wasn't leaving without getting that car shipped to Hawaii!!

Now back to shipping the cars! We signed in and met with a customer service person to fill out some paperwork that required license plate numbers and the current car mileage.  They drove the car around to the large storage garage area and did a thorough look over of any scratches/dings/dents currently on the vehicle.  He took off our license plate and put any remaining items from the car in a box, taped it up, and stuck in the trunk.  At the end he gave us a piece of paper that we will have to present in Germany in order to pick up our vehicle.  It really was super simple and took less than hour from start to finish.  

I am so glad that item is checked off the list, but we will have to share a car for about a month when Ryan returns, so that should be interesting!!! Special thanks to Jennie for going with me and tag teaming shipping our cars overseas!!