My first adventure. Bratislava 1993. I was nine years old.
After i won the Portuguese Chess Championship (Sub 10), the third place finisher's dad got all players without portuguese nationality banned from further official competitions.
The obvious solution presented, was to marry the great female chess player Catarina Leite to gain nationality. I was neutral to that solution but was advised against marrying before i turned ten.
Luckily my great austrian coach, Mr. Matzinger, got me a Fide wild card to go to Bratislava anyway.
My parents had given me 50DM (Deutsche Mark) to splash around a little in the ten days abroad and i quickly converted some into local currency. I had a lot of local currency. On the way to the venue i passed a stand with some sweets and wanted some for 10KR, but accidently handed over 10DM without noticing. I was so happy when i got a bag with two kilograms of sweets, that i did only reconstruct my mistake later on a sugar high.
The chess competition had me a little excited too, but as i couldn't win a game with the black pieces i was on route to finish around two thirds down the field.
I was a lot more excited about a couple of brand new PCs in the players lounge. They had Fritz 1 installed and nerdy little me ran there after each game to analyse my mistakes and learn how computers think chess should be played.
After the work was done a quick game of snake couldn't hurt. Five hours later (i had still not achieved a perfect game) and the janitor closed up the building at midnight and threw me out.
I knew the general direction of the hotel, and the janitor had indicated, that i only had to follow the railtracks to the west. Off i went, even thinking about leaving a trail of sweets like Hänsel and Gretel in case i got lost, but then again i did not know when i was going to get another meal so i decided to lick them instead.
The rails went over some bridges and as i was afraid of not finding the way back to them if i went through the tunnel, i just went over on the rails. It was late, so not too much traffic and i had no problems dodging the oncoming trams.
After some time i started to wonder if i actually was going west at all and the bag of candy was getting notably lighter. But i knew the tracks were going in circles so worst case i would be back in the morning at the venue for the next game.
At that point one of the trams came to a screeching halt some 50 meters in front of me and two of my portuguese coaches jumped out of it screaming and laughing. Looks like they noticed me missing and the whole team was searching for me around the city. Nice.
Back at the hotel i shared the rest of the sweets with some cool brazilian kids and went to bed quite tired. Next day i played for a draw with white and got it.