Bob, your idea of asking the vendor in Africa to get DHL to provide a prepaid waybill from the USDA inspection station address to your home address is very good. The only downside is if the USDA rejects some of the imported plant products, then you may have overpaid for the domestic shipping from the commercial carrier. The other good news is that the USDA folks seem to be very helpful and are experienced in these matters in getting your shipment from commercial vendors forwarded to you. Either approach would work well. The only other question I have for anyone else on the list if they have ever had USDA forward a commercial shipment to their home address without them or their foreign vendor providing a prepaid waybill? Bern in Williamsburg -waiting for Ida to hit tomorrow- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ OK, had I known I needed this, I would've told SA to give me the weight before they shipped and give me time to generate the UPS label and email it to them so they could stick it in the box. For UPS Ground all you need is the weight. And I'm sure it's on the honor system anyway. Because I didn't know to do this, the inspector called from ATL and said I needed to do something about shipping and she suggested I just generate a UPS label and email it to her. She weighed it and said she'd have to go find another carton to repack it in but the weight she gave me was close enough. She gave me their address to use as the sender and said UPS comes by all the time to pick up inspected goods. I went to the UPS web site and as you would expect the process was completely smooth and user friendly for me, a first-time user. A few days later Big Brown dropped the box on my doorstep. It might also be possible for the vendor to just generate a DHL waybill for the local transportation at the same time they are generating the one for the air freight, but I haven't tried that one. In any event I've been trying to alert everyone to this because it's a lot easier to make the UPS or DHL or FedEx label before the box is ever shipped. Hope this is clear. The logistics business has come a long way in the last few decades. Bob 1.5" of rain overnight - the tsunami will come today. _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net>