Here at Ship Overseas, we have many customers who go on vacations all over the world AND take their car with them. Many of these people do not pay any import taxes because their vehicle is not considered an import. We’ll discuss that in an upcoming blog post.
The point of this blog post is to show you how some of our customers accomplish these so called lavish trips along with the costs. Perhaps some of you will be able to go on your dream road trip like our customers do, go on your 2nd honeymoon, or just go road tripping with your best friend (it’ll be ½ the cost!). In the near future we will be posting other one way road trip examples.
So let’s say you live in the USA and you want to go road tripping in Costa Rica, but you don’t want to just visit for a short time and hop on a plane back to the US; how boring. Here is what one of Ship Overseas’ customers would do. They would take their own car to Long Beach, CA and have us ship their car to San Jose, Costa Rica. We are always shipping cars to Costa Rica anyway. The approximate cost to ship a regular car would be around $1, 500 – $2, 200 from Long Beach, CA to San Jose, Costa Rica.
The car will be loaded on the ship and take about 1 week to get to San Jose, Costa Rica. We will haul your car from the arrival shipping port to San Jose, CR. Once it arrives, you can meet our Costa Rican clearing agent in San Jose, CR who will take care of everything. You’ll get your keys and be on your merry way to your road trip. Basically your road trip is starting “in” a great city San Jose, Costa Rica and eventually you’ll be making your way back to the US.
Once you pick up the car, your surf vacation in Costa Rica has begun! Catch the highway and head West toward the beaches. You can get beach front hotels for $80/night! Now that’s cheap, cheap, CHEAP!
Stay for a couple nights then hop to another Costa Rican surf town. You won’t have to worry about anything bad in Costa Rica because it is one of the most peaceful countries in the world. After your vacation, start heading north toward Nicaragua. There are many great surfing towns there. Since you are taking your own car, there is no need to deal with the hassles of taking the bus or spending money on airfare and taxi. Some people may even opt to just sleep in their car! Your trip will be to head up the western coast of Central America eating, sleeping, surfing, and road tripping. Exciting isn’t it? Just add up the costs to see how much it would really be.
Don’t forget to put synthetic oil in your car so you can get 6, 000 miles of driving out of it. Also, remember that before the ship sets sail to Costa Rica from USA, you can only have a maximum of 1/4 tank of gas for safety purposes.