Travel with a Kettlebell as your only luggage

I have now traveled with my Kettlebells a few times and I thought I should share my experiences with some do and do-not.

When I been traveling with the Kettlebell my first attempt has always been to put the Kettlebell in my luggage as part of everything else but the weight has often resulted in that I have had to rethink that strategy. It's however been kind of fun when you get the the baggage drop with 10kg excess luggage and they inform you that this will never work, and then all of a sudden you got 6kg to spare - How could that have happened.... :-)

Trying to bring it on as hand luggage was however not a really good idea, so that time I did end up getting it sent back to me through DHL since that was much cheaper then paying for the excess weight on the flight.

But the best experience was actually this weeks flight when I got to Hamburg from Gothenburg, on the baggage band the my only luggage was the Kettlebell, they had lost my suitcase! Well at least the kettlebell made the flight unharmed and luckily late in the evening I got a call that they found my luggage, glad not to lose my five-fingers and the rest of my other cloths :-).

Below are the main points that I thought myself throughout my experiments with traveling with the Kettlebell.

1. A kettlebell is a heavy items for flight personnel, if you put 16kg in an already full bag you are very likely to exceed their maximum 30kg lift limit.
2. Even if you get your bag to be below the maximum 30kg your weight limit might only be 20kg. Luckily for me when traveling with a seaman's book I usually get 40-60kg. So it might be tough to get both the kettlebell and your suitcase within your weight limit. Just bringing normal hand luggage and checking in the Kettlebell would be your best solution if you can manage your trip with only that.
3. You can't however bring the Kettlebell as hand luggage, tried that already for you. Even if there isn't a single sharp edge on the Kettlebell it's not permitted as hand luggage the main argument seems to be that it's a potential weapon but since they could just say that it's well above the 4-8kg weight limit for your hand luggage so not much to argue about really :-(.
4. If the kettlebell is not going to fit within your weight limit the cheapest option might be to send it through DHL or similar, costs about 60 Euro while the excess luggage can set you back as much as 100 Euro.
5. But the best option is probably just to check in the kettlebell all by itself, it has a nice handle so with a bit of convincing the airport personnel can't really refuse it.