The original post: /r/travel by /u/Whatyoutalkinboutman on 2024-11-14 13:22:52.

My child (year 5 elementary) came home with an interesting challenge from school. The task was to find the shortest travel time (flight duration + layover) by stopping at each capital city in Australia (Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth, and Darwin) - not specifically in that order. You can start anywhere but have to return to the chosen city of origin. Doesn’t matter what time you start but you have to apparently get it to under 24 hrs or as close to as possible.

We chose the most logical route starting in CBR at 6am ->SYD->BNE->DWN->PER->ADL->MEL->HOB->CBR. This was around 18hrs of flight time and 14 hours of layover, most of which came from the overnight layover in PER which blew around 8hrs. We then looked at starting in other cities and times but racking our brains by the end as nothing seemed to work out.

Is it even possible to do this in a shorter time? Ashamedly I looked at this for a few hours after they went to bed and still couldn’t arrive at a better outcome!?

Additional Info: Layover times don’t matter, assuming you can just teleport to the next gate. It also doesn’t matter if the same place is visited twice.