With just a few days left before we head out, there are only a couple of big items left on our to-do list: packing up our apartment and putting things in storage, cleaning our kitchen and bathroom, and getting copies of all our important travel documents. Fun stuff! Fortunately, I’ve been assigned another task–packing our bikes in special boxes for transport over to Japan. This means that I get to sigh and drag my feet and complain about this mundane chore…and then grab a beer out of the fridge and go down to the garage for a couple of hours.

But it’s not all fun and games down there–getting two bikes (including fenders, racks, and other accessories) to fit into a 8.5″ wide box is not easy. Especially when you have to be very careful that everything is well padded and is going to survive 6,300 miles of bouncing around in an airplane’s cargo hold. Here’s what mine looked like after our first attempt:

Bike in a box

There are a lot of great resources out there for learning how to pack a bike for air travel. Here are a couple that I found useful:

After months of carefully assembling and customizing our bikes, it was a little sad to break them down and stuff them in boxes. Fortunately, Vicky took some great pictures of them first! You can see them on our photo gallery section here.