legalfee - Thanks for your response. I'm thinking we'll take the steaks with us packed in dry ice. That's if we can get their reasonable in one day. Their is a good chance we'll be over nighting. Our kids are bring the grandkids and they are promoting over nighting enroute. I suspect the meat won't stay cold if it takes us two days to get to STT. So I was looking for an alternative route to bring meat for grilling. That's why I was asking if anybody had used a third party shipper (Omaha Steaks). I did get some good suggestions about buying locallly.
1. Have steaks in a freezer before you pack them (frozen at least 24-48 hours to freeze solid). Regular freezer works fine, but chest freezer or deep freezer is bonus.
2. Use blocks of ice (not gel packs or ice cubes). I pour off a little bit of from a 8- or 16-oz bottles of drinking water and freeze them solid, that way any meltwater is contained in a bottle.
3. Pack in a sealed styrofoam container. Make sure you don't have a lot of empty space in the container: fill it as much as possible with meat and bottles of frozen drinking water and use packing material (packing peanuts, bubble wrap, crumpled newspaper) to fill any gaps. Personally, I would put the meat on the bottom and all the ice on top, you want any leaking air to melt the ice before it gets to the meat. Tape the cooler shut with duct tape or packing tape (Yes TSA may open it but they will re-tape).
4. Pack as checked luggage, the cargo holds on airplanes are almost freezing temps by themselves.
The steaks will almost certainly still be hard-frozen 48 hours later. (Don't open the container to "check on them" a few times during your trip, trust the science and leave any checking to the TSA).
5. If you are still worried, I would suggest go one step further: if you want ribeyes, buy a boneless prime rib and pack a $5 carving knife from Amazon or a grocery store in the container. Or if you want filet, buy a chunk of tenderloin. A large piece of meat will stay frozen longer than smaller pieces.
At a minimum the steaks will not get above 40 degrees (Refrigerator temperature) in 48 hours. Odds are they will still be hard-frozen.
Three examples:
We buy frozen meat from Slanker Farms and he uses a cardboard box that he lines with styrofoam insulation. No additional ice, but he packs the boxes full so everything is snugly packed with frozen meat. It is shipped 2 days in August (in Texas) in un-airconditioned UPS trucks, and it arrives on our doorstep frozen (or partly frozen when it was delivered one morning and we didn't get it off the porch until evening).
We went with some friends on a fishing charter in Maui and caught like 15 Mahi-Mahi. The captain cleaned the fish and they took it to their hotel and the hotel staff put it in their freezer. My friends packed it in a styrofoam cooler the next day with some bagged ice and checked it. Their return flight was on Labor day, and Delta offered like $1500 per person plus hotel for voluntary bumps. There were some other issues, and they got home ~72 hours late (so about 4 days of total travel time) with around $10,000 in Delta credits for 3 people. The fish was still refrigerator cold (a few ice cubes floating in the water), but they didn't want to re-freeze it, so they ate fish for a week and gave a bunch away.
When I was going away to college, my dad sent a lot of frozen trout and redfish with me packed in a styrofoam cooler. Back then (before vacuum sealers) he would freeze his fish in quart ziploc bags with salt water, so it was quart-sized bags of ice/fish frozen together in the deep freeze. The apartment I had rented was not ready for 4 days after we got there. They put us up in a Motel 6 with no refrigerator (after two days of driving) and when we finally got into the apartment, there was still unmelted ice with the fish, meaning it hadn't gotten above 32 degrees.
So in styrofoam, with large chunks of ice, transported in a cold airline cargo hold... I'm guessing you could leave your cooler of frozen meat in your hotel room, outside the refrigerator for the whole week and it would still be completely safe at the end of your trip. The overnight connection is a non-issue.
See some stories about USVI specifically here:
https://www.vinow.com/wwwtalk/virgin-islands-travel-forum/taking-frozen-meat-to-stj/paged/2/
