66 Hours in Transit

Sometimes being on tour can be glamorous. Interesting cities, nice hotels, exciting people. Other times, not so much.

You might, for example, due to a series of decisions that seemed logical at the time, have booked a trip home that spans four countries, five cities, and sixty six hours. The picture above is an exaggeration of the actual route, but a reasonable depiction of what it feels like.

The main one of the "decisions that seemed logical at the time" was for budgetary reasons when heading out to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Despite its impressive reputation, it's well known that it's very unlikely for a show to make money in Edinburgh. You go there for plenty of good reasons, but profit isn't one of them. In the end we almost broke even with a small loss, which for a first-time show is nothing short of astonishing.

We knew going in that it wouldn't be profitable, and hence shopped around for cheaper flights to keep the production budget low. Long story short, Vyom came up with some very well priced tickets, with the caveat that we had to transit via Beijing and depart from Munich on the return trip.

That actually didn't sound too bad, since A) you need to stop over somewhere on the Melbourne-UK trip and it might as well be in China, and B) the return trip from Munich wasn't a big deal since we both were planning some Europe holidaying after Edinburgh was done.

To cut an even longer story short though, it turned out that I needed to be in Grenada (southern Spain) in the few days before departure. It also turned out that there were no flights that could get me to Munich to catch my flight on the same day. Hence it is now a case of taking a train to Madrid, catching a flight from there to Munich, then staying in Munich for one night, then catching the Munich-Beijing-Melbourne marathon flight back home the next day.

Overall though, it's still worth it. Even though it'll be a pretty draining trip, it's amazing that it's even possible to do this kind of travelling at all. Plus I've never been to Munich before, and one night there will be a nice bonus.

The whole saga will also save a lot of money, which will probably come in useful next time I need some chairs or something.

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