Tours with music groups can range the from the well-organised through the chaotic scramble... so much depends upon the administrative organisation of the group, and a great tour and orchestral manager is really worth their weight in gold! When you are travelling with multiple components and lots of different individual and group schedules in a tour that is broken up with rest and travel days scattered throughout the performance days, you are hoping that all the preparation and planning that has been laid out beforehand is enough to deflect the individual tiredness and general life chaos that comes flying in your direction...
The group that I'm currently on tour, despite being a decent musical ensemble, has a bit of a slightly unstructured tour management at the moment. There are many last minute changes of scheduling, last minute emails with new daily schedules and flight tickets and travel tickets spread everywhere over multiple emails from the last month...
I've done my best to try and organise my own personal scheduling into a DropBox folder (like I do for all projects...)... but today, I screwed up a bit... adding to a series of own goals in the past few days!
Back up couple of days, when we were on the Netherlands leg of the tour... which meant that I got to go home after each concert. It's nice to sleep in your own bed... but it is a mixed blessing, as you also have to travel home on your own steam, rather than catching the tour coach back to the hotel. This means that if you are taking public transport, then you are getting home long after midnight... and still dealing with the daily routine of getting kids to school in the morning as well as dealing with the night terrors of the toddler.
Still, I like being at home...
Before the last Dutch concert, I had dropped by a nice Christmas market and picked up some nice presents for my family and a present for my brother's baby daughter. However, being sleep deprived (this orchestra tours with very little scheduling for sleep...), I left all the presents in the dressing room... after all, I arrived with a clothes bag and an instrument case... and that is what I left with... minus the two paper bags of presents!
So, I had written to later to the concert venue and the orchestra manager... hoping that someone had found it and returned it. The venue was first to reply and said that they had found nothing... so, I resigned myself to having lost the purchases. However, I got an email later from the orchestra manager saying that he had found it and would put it in the timpani transport cases... which I would next see at the end of the week in Spain! Cool!
Fast forward to yesterday... an early morning chaos start. My wife and I leaving for different places, she was going to her work in a different city, and I was going to my work via the airport in Italy. An early flight though... Thankfully, everything went smoothly, and we ended up in Milan... in time to the get to the hotel to be told that none of our rooms would be ready until the late afternoon... after our rehearsal, and just before the concert...
Luckily, I have a great colleague who always checks out the best places to eat when we are on tour (hence the fact that I have lots of really great restaurants to feature on Tasteem!)... so, we killed time by eating some pretty damn amazing seafood pasta, dessert (for lunch!) and coffee! Could be worse....
... and it did get worse... the huge Basilica that we played in was FREEZING! Plus the fact that many of us were dead tired after nearly two weeks of travelling and touring... There was a late starting time for the concert, which meant that the concert didn't finish until after midnight... there is nothing like shivering to death on stage, and trying not to fall asleep when you aren't playing... and trying to keep your wavering concentration intact when you are playing! Sigh... the things that an audience will never know about...
... that said, there were others who had it much worse... the French contingent of the orchestra had gone home on the rest day... into the arms of a nation-wide all sector strike that is nearing it's second week?!!?!?!? Well, they slept at the airport in France... to turn around and fly out to rejoin the tour in Italy...
Which leads me to this morning... after a very short night... 5 hours, broken by hourly car alarms and sirens... I hate big cities...
I had requested an early morning flight, to be able to pick up my kids. I had checked in for a flight yesterday, and went to the airport with the handful of other people who had opted for the crack of dawn flight... only to find out that my KLM app was showing me the ticket for the LATE flight! @#$%@$%&@&%^&@$#%....
So, a hasty phone call to the tour manager (who was in Netherlands, asleep but with the phone on as there are always emergencies happening... she told me that I did have a ticket for both flights! She just booked me on the early flight without cancelling the other later flight... and due to my sleep addled state, I had just followed the check-in prompts for the later KLM flight.. and missed the notification for the earlier Alitalia flight! Ooooops....
Feeling sheepish... I checked in... and the friendly check-in desk let me have the check-in luggage, even though it wasn't on the ticket! Lucky, one thing going right in the morning... or maybe I just looked tired and on the verge of breaking down...
Needless to say, this put me on the back end of the boarding time and on the wrong side of security... luckily, everything in Italy runs efficiently! (HAha.....). I got to security... it was chaos... and then when I reached the machine for the inspection... it BROKE DOWN! So, I had to join the other queue... losing precious time!
Thankfully, I did make it in the end... I didn't have to run like crazy like some guy near me... who was sprinting for the gate, only to trip on a suitcase and fall crazily about 3 metres away and skidding across the floor....
So, making it back into The Netherlands... I had to head quickly for my wife's work... to pick the kids up from her. That was when I got a phone call from the orchestra manager who was in Italy on the later flight... yep, the ticket that wasn't cancelled... they were calling over the gate and airport speakers for me... sigh... great team communication! Anyway, I told him I was now in Amsterdam... I bet they wish they could just tie trackers to all the musicians... possibly with dynamite...
Grabbed the kids... and had to rush back home, to get my oldest daughter ready for her Kerstdiner at school... they have to make a dessert for another kid, complete with plate decorations... so, another thing to do in a short time... meanwhile, I need to check in for the flight tomorrow to Spain... and spin up a Cardano TestNet wallet so that it can hopefully be synced up before I leave.
Well.. the plate decorations went well, luckily my oldest is pretty good at that sort of thing.. I will post pictures later. The Cardano node is still syncing several hours later... hopefully done before the end of the night.
However, the check in... where the @%%$%#$%!^is the booking code? I called around my colleagues... and apparently it was in an email from a couple of days ago as an attachement. The subject line of the email was helpfully titled "Maps for Milano".... I would have personally written two emails... one with maps and another with the Spain air ticket information... with appropriate titles????
Okay... all of that was done with a little bit of time to spare... drive oldest to school... and then have a dinner date with the youngest whilst we waited to pick up the oldest later (too difficult to drive home in peak hour traffic...). We actually had a nice pizza and some dessert... I think the little one ate more ice-cream than she ever has in a single sitting... it looked smaller in the menu photo...
Got home and got the girls to bed... I'm barely awake as I write this... Now that the girls are asleep, I have to run out and clean up the glass that my oldest dropped in front of a neighbour's driveway. There are some pretty large pieces that will do horrible things to a car tyre... I just hope it isn't raining...
I will sleep like a log tonight... of course, probably disrupted by the little one... I have all my bags and instruments packed and ready to go again, it is going to be a drop kids to school, leave the car somewhere my wife can find it and get myself immediately to the airport. What could possibly go wrong?
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