The Move

For our move we shipped 8 18-gallon Rubbermaid Roughneck totes from Pittsburgh to Goodnews Bay. Those totes had everything from home that we thought we couldn’t live without. The totes ranged in weight from 40-50lbs and ranged in price from $60-80. Thankfully, Amazon Prime honors their free 2-day shipping and we were able to purchase several items that would’ve been too expensive to ship.  It is extremely difficult to find someone who will ship to the bush let alone a company that will ship to the bush for no extra cost! If our move persuades you to move to Bush Alaska—we recommend a subscription to Amazon Prime.

A shipment of boxes from Amazon Prime.

Amazon Prime saved the day several times! We have purchased a wide variety of things online from sheets and towels to shelf stable food. We didn’t get all of our food from Amazon though. We spent about 2 days in Anchorage on our way to Bethel. During that time we shopped at Sam’s Club, Walmart, REI and Sportman’s Warehouse in order to arrive in the bush as prepared as possible. Sam’s Club and Walmart will both pack and ship your purchases for you—however, that seems a little too easy for first timers, so we decided to pack and ship our own stuff! After a trip to Sam’s Club our first night in Anchorage that filled our rental car to the roof, we purchased totes and set out packing them to ship. OH YEA—I should mention that as we were checking out with our first order from Sam’s Club our credit card was denied. The cashier suggested that sometimes this happens when people purchase as much as we had and said she would try again with half of the balance. Still no. We’re super thankful for great fraud protection, but at this point we had both been awake for about 20 hours and we were ready to sleep.  This was possibly not the most ideal time for a shopping trip, however, after another few attempts we were able to get the purchase to go through.

After packing all of the above food into the blue totes to ship, we decided that another trip to Sam’s Club was in order. This time we purchased quite a bit less and had a good 6 hours of sleep under our belt to help with the process. In total we shipped 11 totes of food from Anchorage. Whew. That was quite a task and one we’ll likely never do again. It was fun, but it was something you’ll only find fun once.

We spent our entire full day in Anchorage packing and shipping the totes. At the post office we discovered something that made us super excited—our 11 boxes of food were only going to cost us approximately $20 to ship to Goodnews Bay. If you’ll recall from above, our totes from Pittsburgh averaged somewhere between $60-80, and these food totes were MUCH heavier! That was a huge relief.

Thankfully, we got most of our totes here in Goodnews within about a week of shipping them in Anchorage. We were happy to find that we only had a few shipping casualties.