Ida Maria – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the alternative rock artist, Ida Maria, shares one of her stories from being on the road. You can check out the story, after the break.

We were doing a tour in Australia, in December, right around xmas time, which is summertime in Australia. We had an amazing time, played Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, each bandmmember got a rooftop suite, with swimmingpool, we really felt on top of the world and that we had “made it” finally. When it was time to leave Australia and travel the insane distance back to freezing Norway to celebrate xmas with our families, we as a band had a discussion – mauve we should just celebrate xmas here in Australia. But after some discussions we decided to go back home. Jumped hungover as hell on the plane, all depressed, we felt like we were going in the wrong direction. And we was.

Middle landed in HongKong, we all ate some strange mushroom soup, with more different types of mushrooms than I´ve ever seen. Next leg of the trip was Hong Kong to Oslo. We were set to stay one night at an airport hotel in Oslo, before I was going home to the Arctic Norway to my family, and the bandmates was going to Stockholm where they all lived. After more than 36 hours of travelling we finally made it to Gardermoen airport in Oslo.

We had six guitars/basses, and drums plus luggage. There was two meters of snow outside and we organixed ourselves as usual to get a big cab so we could get all our equipment to the hotel. Unfortunately we picked the wrong cabdriver. He was in a bad mood. We told him the address to the hotel but he kept driving us to the wrong hotel. Eventually it turned into a big argument where the cabdriver stopped the cab in the middle of nowhere, in the snowstorm, and threw all our instruments in the snow and drove off. But he drove off the road, right in front of us. So we went over and helped him push the car out of the snow. Then he was more friendly and let us load the instruments up again into the car.

Then we finally found the hotel. We arried in the reception exhausted. With all our instruments, hungry and tired as hell. But we had arrived. It was xmas time abd the hotel had set up this amazing buffet with all the wonderful xmas food you can imagine. After that mushroom soup in HongKong we were all ready to dig into some scandinavian xmas food. But we had to check in first. Turned out our record label had FORGOT to book rooms for us. And the buffet was only for the “guests of the hotel”. So here we were sat, after 40 hours of traveling and little to no food, a crazy cabdriver, snowstorm two days before xmas and a buffet and a hotel we were not allowed to acces. The hotel allowed us to sit in the reception and stare at the buffet for the three hours it took for the label to sort out our booking.

And eventually we ate, slept and went home for xmas. We shouldve stayed in Australia…..

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