The joy of traveling with vault poles....

This trip has been by far the most interesting experience I've ever had with vault poles. I shipped them down to the dominican 8 days early and they arrived 40 minutes after the start of the decathlon pole vault.
The funny story, however, comes after the competition. Paul's poles never showed up so we only had 2 bags to worry about. Harlan's flight left early on Sunday morning. The shuttle from the hotel left without him so he had to take a taxi and left his poles at the hotel. I was staying an extra day with Brian (vault coach) and Lela. Our goal was to figure out how in the world to get 2 sets of poles back to the US. The shipping companies only pick up from Airports internationally so we had to get them to the airport. We were dropped off in a bus at the airport and I ran inside to talk to the American Airlines rep. They informed me the poles would fit on the plane but they had nowhere for us to store the poles until Monday. I begged and pleaded as we had no way of getting the poles anywhere since our ride had left (or so we thought). Finally they took us through a door back into their office area. There was a short hallway, then a 90 degree turn to another hall followed by an s-turn to the hallway where there was more than enough room to store the bags. Only problem was getting them there! The whole bag would not fit so we had to take out each individual pole and literally bend them around the corner and put them back in the bags. This process took us about 40 min.
We then took a taxi to this beach front resort where we were staying that night. Only $150 for 3 people all-inclusive drinks and food! While it rained most of the day, we had such a great time.
Brian and I then headed back to the hotel in the late morning on Monday to reverse the entire pole process again, pole by pole until we had them all back out in front of the ticketing desks. We checked the poles as luggage and headed to our gate. We were eating a sandwich just before boarding the plane when 2 AA reps came up and told us the flight was too full and unfortunately our poles wouldn't fit! UGH!!!
So right now our poles are sitting in Santo Domingo airport awaiting a non-full flight on a plane big enough to fit the poles.
I still have a set of poles in Italy from last year (they wanted to charge me 700 Euros to ship them back so I left them at the meet promoters house).