Here we were, we'd found a Spiegel Palace, it seemed to be almost complete and all we had to do was have one of our team fly over to inspect it then a week later send some crew and a lorry over to collect it all, but there were 2 tiny problems.... Brexit and Covid. The newly enacted Brexit regulations meant that we couldn't send a whole team of staff over to load the trailer as that would require Visa's and a mountain of paperwork, whilst covid restrictions meant that it was effectively impossible to fly anyone out to undertake the initial survey or employ huge teams of local crew to load the lorry. We were so close to securing this tent but we knew that if we didn't act fast it could easily rot away and another of these gorgeous travelling dance venues would be lost to history.
Speaking with the family they were able to clear away much of the debris in front of the tent and get us some clearer photos of what was there:-
We were in luck; whilst we couldn't really understand what most of these parts were it was clear that much of the flooring and the metal structures (though rusty) looked to be reasonably solid; we had to take a gamble and agreed to buy the tent; we'd finally found one we could rescue! All that remained was to solve the problem of crew for physically loading the pieces into our trailers to bring back to the Uk - our brilliant driver Nick found a perfect solution; a friend in the Netherlands had a large specialist telehandler we could borrow so two empty trucks set off across the channel to the Netherlands, picked up the huge Telehandler then drove down to the Swiss boarder where the family barn was located. The journey took 3 days but on Tuesday evening they arrived and immediately assessed everything that was there. With the help of one of the family members each pile of pieces was strapped and banded onto a pallet then the whole pallet lifted and placed inside our trailer - it took 2 days to get everything out of the barn, organised and loaded but between the 4 of them (and a very big telehandler) they managed it. Friday morning they set their Satnavs for Calais and began the 2 day journey home. Of course Brexit hasn't just created the difficulty of sending crew across the channel; it also introduced a whole new level of paperwork and declarations to bring objects into the UK - we had to produce a complete inventory of that we were bringing in, the weights of the respected parts, their values and even HS standardisation codes for it all; if any of the paperwork was incomplete or incorrect the whole load would be refused and our trucks would be stuck in France. How could anyone catalogue and classify the random contents of a barn that were pieces of a Spiegel Palace that no one alive had seen fully assembled, let only put a value on a type of structure that is rarely sold? well it's not just our drivers who are amazing; in the office we have some wonderful staff who are used to tackling impossible problems with crazy tight timescales. As the trailers were being loaded Nick had been forwarding pictures and notes to Sharalyn who had spent the previous week talking to import an export agents, tax and duty specialists, accountants, advisors all to prepare for this problem; she poured over Nick's photos and notes, cross referenced them with the advice she had been given and (just an hour before the trailers were due to check in to Calais port) had managed to pull together all the information, reports, invoices and paperwork that were needed (in 2 languages) filed them with the appropriate legal bodies and received a cleared permission to sail; a staggering achievement at the best of times but doubly so when trying to deal with learning a whole new legal framework that had only come in to force a few weeks before.
8am Saturday morning the text came through - our trailers and the Spiegel Palace were in the UK and heading up the motorway to our warehouse. The brilliant Nick & his team, Sharalyn & her network of advisors and agents had pulled off a miracle making this the first Spiegel Palace (or in fact any tent whatsoever) to cross the newly enacted UK Customs boarder and had done so flawlessly. It had cost us almost £13,000 is additional fees and costs but it was done and we finally had our very own Spiegel Palace!