Depending on your tour, you will end up doing lots of driving and for this you will need a reliable car. Also every time we go on tour, we start from Ireland, this means we need to get the car on the continent. The ferries can be expensive, but there are savings if you book early. Also the size of your vehicle effects the price hugely. We used to have a big old Mercedes bus, that was high and weighed over 3.5 tons. This was an expensive trip every time. And I can straight away tell you, if you have 3.5 ton car, don't even think about going to Austria, the road tax will eat in to your tour budget like crazy. In France you have toll roads, in Czech, Slovakia, Austria and Switzerland you have road tax. This can be anything from €7 for 7 days to hundreds for a year, but again as long as your car is not over 3.5 ton, these prices should be reasonable. For the actual driving part I got some help here from a good friend and a fellow musician Des Gorevan, the drummer from Sliotar, who also does the driving on Sliotars tours. He also takes care of the travel arrangements, and our accommodation on days off. As I mentioned above, we come from Dublin and most of our concerts are on continent, in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Czech rep. And Austria. So first thing is to get the band and the car to the continent. There are several routs and we have done most of them by now. And we have also done them on our tour bus, and old Mercedes 608D bus that Des lovingly converted in to a camper van. We also had an seven seater people carrier for few years, that was registered as a private car. Now we have a commercial volkswagen van that has two rows of seats and compartment for our equipment. On fuel the last one has been the best, but as it is commercial, you get hit on overnight passenger ferries hard, even though our Camper bus was much bigger. Some of them double or even triple in price. Currently (summer 2011) the best way for us on a commercial vehicle was Dublin to holly head, drive across Wales and England, which does require an overnight stop, and then the euro tunnel cross to France. If you can do the drive in private car, you will have much more options on ferries. I think our favorite rout was Rotterdam to Hull and then from Holyhead to Dublin. You spend the night on the ferry, which can be bit of fun:-). But again it all comes down to the tour budget, and trying to keep the cost down. This also applies to bands coming from Continent to UK or Ireland. All the ferry companies have websites where you can get quotes for what ever car you have, but just remember the prices will go up the later you book them. Ideally I would like to have the tour schedule fully finalized 6 months in advance, but unfortunately this is never the case. Some festivals book an year in advance, some even couple months before. And then you try to fill in the gaps with pubs, and they can be even month before the tour. So yeah, unfortunately the reality is that sometimes we only get to book the ferries about few weeks before the trip.
Make sure your car is serviced before the tour, breaking down on the road can be expensive and in worst case you will end up missing concerts. In this case you start to be in serious financial loss. Also satellite navigation system is a must. You don't need to be looking for places in a strange city, and again possibly be delayed at gigs. And if you turn up late at gig, it is your fault, not the organizers. So if they still let you pay, don't expect a full fee, I know you just had a bad day, but so did they while waiting for you to turn up.
Ok So this subject really has more in it than I can fit in a few blogs, so we will continue with this next week:-) For now, I'll be back home in few days time and look forward to the next rehearsals with JPKALLIO.COM :-) Have a great week!
J.P.
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