Holidays

The Damsel and I made the decision to skip our December trip to California. We figure the holiday traffic and all the other B/S out there was not worth the hassle, so we’re going to remain here in beautiful and peaceful Wickenburg, Arizona for the holidays.

Since we have been Christmas shopping for our family in California, we needed a way to get their gifts to them. We normally would just throw them in the back of the truck and take them to California, but that isn’t going to happen this time. We decided that USPS priority mail would get the job done.

In the past, we have shipped for individual events like birthdays and Mother’s day, etc. and used USPS on-line services to print labels for the packages. We either dropped the package off at the local post office or waited for the carrier to drive by the house and hand them off.

I went on-line today and bought all the postage and printed out the labels for this shipment of eight items. Damsel and I use flat-rate priority mail just because it’s the most hassle-free way to prepare our own shipment. I scheduled a request for the mail carrier to stop at our house and pick up the items tomorrow.

The cost of the postage using this method is not particularly inexpensive; it averaged $10.65 per parcel. But, the way we figure it, the cost of fuel to go round trip to the Los Angeles area would be more than two and a half times the amount we spent shipping the items.