This is a just in case: our experience in getting two track bikes to London.

We wanted to ship 'em cause its hard to catch public transport with bikes in boxes and we need to catch both BART (bay area's poor excuse for a subway) and the tube in London. Also riding to and packing your bike at the airport can be a real hassle - if you don't pack 'em sufficiently well then they just won't survive the 'careful' freight handlers.

This morning we went to a USPS office with the dimensions of our bike boxes and weight and the clerk said it would be fine, postage would be about $70. This afternoon after dragging them over there, they said the boxes were too big!!! Great!

UPS wanted $391 dollars per bike!!! Nice!

So we've just repacked so we can take one bike under our baggage allowance (no extra charge for the bike we're told - joy of international flights) and pay the excess baggage fee for the other - 140 bones from SFO to LHR.

The only other cheap(ish) option is to find a freight forwarder but you'd would want to ship other stuff too as they charge palate consolidation, custom clearance and other fees. For just two bikes the shipping here would probably expensive(ish). But still cheaper than bloody UPS.