A Slow Boat to Switzerland

I sometimes think that the United States Postal Service is trying to emulate Mexico with slow, erratic service.

When I was in Mexico this spring I bought some little souvenirs for my Swiss cousins.  After returning home I took a couple of the items... small, hand-made, copper vases for my cousin Brigitta and for my cousin Walter and his wife Helen... to a nearby UPS Store.  I asked how much it would cost to ship them to Switzerland.  When I was told that it would cost $176 per package, I asked the clerk to simply pack them for me.  (That was a very reasonable $4.)  I then took the two boxes to the U.S. Post Office.  Postage was not cheap... around $25 each... but that was certainly better than paying the UPS price.  

Those two packages were sent on May 24th. Ten days later, on June 3rd, I sent two more packages, one to my cousin Ruth in Switzerland and another to my cousin Hans Peter who lives in Norway.  

I tracked the progress of the boxes on the U.S. Postal Service website.  The first two packages languished for nearly a month at the Cleveland Distribution Center, and then for days at the Chicago International Distribution Center.  There was never any notification that they had arrived in Switzerland.

The package to Ruth took a circuitous route from Cleveland to Detroit to San Francisco to Washington, D.C. and finally to Zurich.  Even though her gift had been sent later, on June 23rd Ruth emailed me and told me that she had received the package that day.

The box to Norway went by way of Detroit, San Francisco and Copenhagen.  It made it to Oslo, but I have no word from Hans Peter on whether it arrived in Bergen where he lives.  Any further delay is the fault of the Norwegian postal system.  

Meanwhile, the earlier two packages had still not arrived at their destinations.  Finally, two days ago I received an email from Brigitta that her present had arrived, and yesterday Walter wrote me that they had received their package.  

Brigitta sent me a photo of the vase with a couple of roses from her garden.

It took 44 days for those two boxes to go from Ohio to Switzerland.  I doubt that it took that long for my Swiss ancestors to cross the Atlantic in a steamship in the 1870s!