High Adventures in the Great Outdoors

On the Road Again  

Touring is a young man’s sport, at least until a band reaches a level of mainstream success that enables one to travel in comfort and style. While the advent of the internet has made it easier than ever to connect and music as well as performances accessible via the click of a button, nothing rivals the real-life experience.

Over the years of roaming around, especially when it comes to touring with bands, it proved not only to be essential to pack light, create a plan of places to visit outside the realm of venues but to arrange for accommodation ahead of time – especially when it comes to navigating your way across the more sparsely populated places of this earthround, i.e. Australia.

Apart from the logistics of arranging travel between the capital cities and navigating the long distances on terra australis, staying well-rested during travel and touring with late nights and early mornings is vitally important to keep spirits up. No matter how appealing the journey itself might be, a nice comfy bed to sleep in does wonders.

Using services like AirBnB might be an option but come with the complication of picking up keys, et cetera, it is not often a feasible option. Having spent night in a wide variety of places and accommodations ranging from sleeping on floors, which is more often than not the go-to for low budget tours, to five star hotels, nothing beats a hotel for me – all the more if it is well-priced yet also offers a bit of style and added comfort, despite it being out of the question on most tours.

Enter the newly established Little National hotels in Sydney and Canberra, which take space efficiency, compactness and minimalism to stylishly new heights.

Yes, the rooms are small, however, the spatial design of the layout reminiscent of Japanese architecture is an example par excellence for effective planning with the lion’s share of the space being dedicated to specifically designed oversized Arms of Morpheus beds, which wedged in between two walls and equipped with a smart TV with fluffy super king doonas range on the more comfortable scale of hotel beds I have encountered.

If I had to pin down the DNA of Little National it would come down to a commitment to entering the small doors of minimalism to arrive on the other side with altered values of warmth and comfort, reduced to essential necessities but done in style with a keen and clever sense for functional use of space, ambience and technology, i.e. providing guests with everything they need and literally nothing they do not.

With sustainability ranking high on the agenda, waste is reduced to a minimum with shared facilities to get your caffeine fix or hydrate 24/7.

In a world where “boutique” is often used in lieu of the provision of good service, Little National Hotels make sleek and well-thought through accommodation an affordable and fun option to catch some Zs, which especially in the world of vaudeville and touring is essential, as it might be one of the most glamourized aspects of being in a band but reality is that where one  sees anything outside the confines of a van ‘n venue and the nature of the game is “hit and run”. It is not for nothing that musical acts from The Eagles via Leonard Cohen to Elvis, Chris Isaak and Snoog Dog have penned homages to hotels…

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image from company website