[Dave Campbell]

Outside of shipping costs, check with the RD and the Regional Planning Committees of the events you plan to attend. They may be able to connect you and other travelling teams assistance.
I know that we would certainly do everything we could for you at the Queen City Regional - ie. you could ship your crate to us, we'd deliver it to the venue, help with hotel costs or home-stays, and meals for your team, or teams. We also have a fairly decent spare set of tools we would share with your team so you may be able to reduce the weight of shipping your equipment; We could work with logisitcs to get your robot to the next location.
One issue would be to make sure that our events (Hawaii and Queen City) don't happen on the same weekend!
I'm sure there are other teams/planning committees that would offer similar help. I hope that when we convert to districts, teams in your situation would be offered exceptions. We can either watch the evolution of the next phase of FIRST, or we can do our best to influence and affect positive changes.