Shipping excess luggage back to US

Not to pile on, but piling on we travel for as long as six weeks with twenty pounds or thereabouts. Excess weight is a big problem and several times we have sent stuff home through the mail, but only fifteen or twenty pounds of purchases.

Fred, I would post this question on tripadvisor.com Beirut forums, there will be a great likelyhood of getting an answer there, sometimes even from a local or an expat.
Just google tripadvisor.com beirut forums,, easy to find.

So she never heard about packing light? Pat has given you some good information.

Usually the cheapest option is to bring it with her as excess baggage on the plane. Another option that may work, if you have a military connection, is to take it to a military base and send it parcel post. When I was overseas the APO's charged the same as shipping domestically. (I don't know what military APO's are still out there though). The third option, of course, is Goodwill - or some local variety of charity to donate her clothes to.

Ditto what Brad said on the excessive baggage fees at the airport. I studied abroad when I was in college and made the mistake of shipping two packages home of things I didn't want to cart home. Paying an excessive baggage fee would have been cheaper and I wouldn't have gone through the agony of wondering if the packages would actually arrive! Luckily, mine arrived, but it was nerve-wracking few weeks. Good will is a great option, too. I threw out a lot of the clothes I took, since I didn't take many with me to start with and by the end of 4 months, they were pretty done. That made room for some of the new purchases I made. Also, if you're traveling over, maybe you can pack extra light, take an extra empty suitcase or duffel bag, and split the baggage between the two of you to minimize the fees. Good luck!

Becca thats a great answer,, Dad( Fred) you bring only underwear and a toothbrush ,, and then you can take home about 50 pounds of her stuff!

Thank you everyone so far! Pat, am trying the TripAdvisor route as well. I think just paying overage fee to the airline would be the best bet but we're doing a lot of overland travel in Europe (bus, train, car and a local Venice to Paris flight) after leaving Lebanon. Not sure that option is open to us. Will check airline. Also,
I KNOW she will not donate her stuff. Took her "cutest" things! I could also travel over empty and just hit "Goodwill"after arrival!

Fred you have one lucky daughter if she has 100 lbs of "cutest things".. thats alot of clothes and shoes. lol , lucky lucky girl.
Good luck, hope it works out for you guys. If not,, even convincing her to pare down a bit may be a good idea.

The cost is in line with UPS or Fed Ex. Sending by regular post office will be cheaper but at greater risk. You might at least get it to a country with a more trust-worthy post office. Certainly the cheapest way is to bring it home as extra baggage but it means lugging it around. Maybe she'd reconsider how cute her things are if she is forced to carry it all ;-)

I don't know how reliable the Lebanese post office is, but it might be worth checking to see if they have a surface or sea mail shipping option. When you ship something by surface mail, it can take a lot longer to arrive but it usually is much, much cheaper. The USPS no longer offers this option, but I think that some countries still do.

Fred, what airport are you flying out of to return home? I realize that you will lose some vacation time, but could you travel to that city and either leave the excess bags at your last hotel or a locker at that train station or the airport? (If you leave it at a baggage deposit, be sure they'll let you leave it for 2 weeks!)

She needs to scale down her clothes to the good stuff, and dump the rest. Then, she could make checked baggage limits.

Intresting..what my daugheters did was to give away the clothes they took with them as they were so tired of wearing the same things they didn't want to see again! I'm sure see has lots of friends who would love to have those clothes!

Those of you responding are forgetting just how long 3 months sounds to you when you are 21 years old. I went to Germany of six months when I was 19 and it felt like a lifetime to me. So, it's not really out of the question to have 100 pounds of stuff. It's probably not all clothes. Now, while this is not the heaviest item in the suit case, but I will alway remember my room mate in Germany opening her suitcase and several hundred tampons fell out. LOL. Then there was the time when I was 23 and I dragged a set of hot rollers all over England and Scotland, which we (my sister and I) used only once because we blew out a fuse the first time at our B&B. (I'm actually currently dragging a set of hot rollers to KY once a month and reflect on that first trip to Scotland with the hot rollers every time I pack them. So, they are an odd type of souvenir from that trip.) At any rate, let's cut the daughter some slack. I say have her send some items back by postal service. Pick items that you're the least stressed over. At different stages of life we have to give up some of our stuff, but it's hard the first time. Pam

Thank you all for your input. Well, we just returned from our little adventure without having to lug my daughter's 100 lbs of excess baggage all over Italy and France. Our itinerary was Beirut-Rome-Tuscany-Venice-Paris-Home. As it turned out our flight to Rome went via Paris. So we checked her bags in Beirut only as far as Paris then left them at "Baggages du Monde" right in Charles de Gaulle. Then just picked them up and checked them in for flight home two weeks later. Excess baggage fees and storage at CDG amounted to around $250 versus the $600 quoted by UPS. Air France didn't even charge us excess baggage fee Paris to San Diego since we had already paid an excess baggage fee through their partner Middle East Airlines.