Inspired by this thread.
I have a favorite story of the package I planned to mail to England on September 12, 2001. I couldn’t get it out till September 19, 2001.
I guess the gummit must have been busy with something else then, because it got there on January 26, 2002.
Not me personally, but a friend went to a trip to Africa where she bought a ton of local stuff. Not wanting to pay a fortune in overweight charges at the flight, she decided to ship them from Kenya to Iceland.
The package bounced from harbour to harbour, slowly making its way north, finally reaching Reykjavik six months later.
(in their defence, they said it would take a while)
I ordered a DVD from Australia that took seven weeks to arrive.
42 days to Canada.
Not a package, but I once mailed a substantial check (around $8000, IIRC) to a supplier located about 4 miles from my office. It hadn’t arrived a week later and they complained, so I hand-delivered a replacement - and asked that they send back the first check when it finally arrived.
This it did, about 4 months later. They had forgotten about the agreement to return the check, but did call me wondering what the “new” check was for. When I asked what was the postmark date, all became clear.
I sent my aunt in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a Christmas card from Paris on December 19, 1999. I knew it wouldn’t get there in time for the holiday, the point was getting a very pretty French card. She received it February 13, 2000. Christmas card… for Valentine’s Day!
The first week of December 2005 I mailed a package to a friend in South Korea. She got it at Saint Patrick’s day, 2006.
I wound up with an extra copy of Baldur’s Gate 2 Collectors Edition, and sold the second one on ebay. The guy was from Australia, and it took something like 3 months for it to get there from Western PA in the USA.
Also had a buyer from Israel pick up a Quake package I sold on ebay. It also took about 3 months. We had some problems with this one, as he didn’t want to use the postal service. Apparently they tend to go through private mail over there. We actually became pretty good friends over this, and I still talk to him to this day (this was about 8 or 9 years ago).
I was on the receiving end–but it took over 3 years to get from Florida to New Jersey!
A family friend mailed a gift to my son shortly after he was born. They never received a thank-you note from us, and didn’t really think anything of it.
Fast forward 3+ years. My son was really into sticking pennies in banks, and just loved fishies. Suddenly, the most wonderful silver fish-shaped coin bank showed up in the mail! How did they know?
I called to say thank you for the perfect and timely present. They were more than a little bit confused. “What do you mean you just got it? We mailed it when he was born!” Sure enough, the package was dated 3 years previously.
So who the heck knows what happened? Maybe it fell behind a rack or something and didn’t get found for a few years.
But I gotta hand it to the U.S. Postal Service. They delivered it. Someone could have just as easily seen the little 3-years-late package, said “oh shit!” and slipped it into a garbage can. But they didn’t. It was definitely better late than never. 
Thanks, USPS!
There was a tea exchange on here about 3 or 4 years ago. I sent out packages of tea TWICE and they STILL haven’t arrived.
I’m assuming any day now I’ll get a PM from a bemused doper going WTF?!?!?
When I worked in my college mailroom, we once had a package show up from Turkey that had been postmarked six months earlier. It was a hand-knit sweater meant as a Christmas gift. Which showed up in Chicago. In June. (The reason I know what it was, by the way, was because the package had been torn open and also had a giant tire tread across it; the USPS had repackaged it in a big Ziploc bag with a preprinted apology note stuck inside.)
I sent Miles the Monkey to someone in Florida and about 4 or 5 months later he returned to me.
About three months–I sent myself clothes in a large box to Australia via USPS sea cargo. Heck of a lot cheaper than any other method, but in the interim I was stuck wearing the same two or three outfits for a month.
Well, I’m still waiting for my package to be delivered, but 16 days is nothing compared to some of these stories—makes me feel good to know I’m not alone!
I sent a package from Scotland to my parents in Pennsylvania in February 1993. It arrived in September of that year, with note apologizing for sending the package to Australia by mistake.
In 1964, I mailed four boxes of books to myself from London to Urbana, IL. The first one arrived about three weeks later, but the last one took three months (and the other two were somewhere in between).
A month, going to a friend of mine in Colorado. It took a similar package a week to get to Ottawa, using the same delivery service. Go figure.
Back as a missionary in Japan in the early 80s, I send a number of things home by slow boat. A few of them took 3 months or so.