Monday, Mike called the shipping company in Ohio to get an update on the delivery.  He found out that the POD was in Phoenix and due to arrive in Tucson that night.  Delivery was expected to be this Thursday, possibly Wednesday.  Tuesday morning at 0645, the local freight company driver called and said he had a delivery for me and would arrive in a couple of hours!  As we talked, the driver came to realize that he had delivered the skylights during our new home construction at the end of December 2008! He remembered the place and wasn't happy.  He called the area "not truck friendly".  I pointed out all the other large trucks and crane that had delivered all sorts of large items during construction.  True to his word, the driver arrived on time; and we moved the three pallets up our short driveway. See the photo at the top of the page.  Gee, those are large boxes!  The driver was great and turned out to be very cooperative.  Thanks guy!

I then had to spend most of the rest of the day with several contractors who arrived to do  

some work on our newly completed custom home (we moved in 26 June).  When we moved in, we had the movers put a lot of boxes in the garage, thinking that we wouldn’t have to deal with them for awhile.  So I had to clear out enough room in the garage for the POD, since it will likely be a couple of weeks before we can set up the POD. Once I had made room, I moved the two individual dome boxes (seen on the left of the photo above) to the garage. I had to uncrate the other two boxes with the bays and door to move them to the  

garage.  But I managed it ALONE!  (The wife had errands to run.)  I used a furniture dolly to help me.  Here you can see three of the bays nested in one of the boxes:

It looks like the POD components came through the shipping just fine!

And more good news: as a result of my rearranging the moving boxes, I found the boxes with my tools!  I’ll need some of them to assemble the POD.

Some of the shipping boxes had some minor damage (seen in the photos below), but the POD components came through shipping just fine.

The way the components are placed inside the boxes provided enough clearance to avoid damage from such occurrences.

Now I need to open a small box containing various parts, the DVD showing how to set the POD, and my SkyShed POD cap!  But first, we have to unpack more of our household goods!  Set up of the POD likely won't be able to occur for a couple more weeks.  But I am excited to be the proud owner of a SkyShed GPOD XL5 observatory, and I can’t wait to put it to use!  Thanks to Wayne and Lorelei Parker and their team at SkyShed POD!  Everyone has been great, and the experience has been tremendously positive!