written by Melli & Julia

This story is related to VoA’s song “A Journey To Remember” as you could already guess.
What is it all about? Read below!

Let’s start a month before … In August 2019 Visions Of Atlantis released, as promotion of their album “Wanderers”, two music videos on Napalm Records’ official YouTube channel.
“A Journey To Remeber” (August 2nd, 2019) & “Nothing Lasts Forever” (August 23rd, 2019)

Among others, both videos were shot at Aflenz Bürgeralm in Styria, Austria. You remember the last scene of “A Journey To Remember”? Thomas threw his drumstick down the valley and no one thought somebody will see this drumstick ever again.

At the end of August 2019, Visions Of Atlantis started their “Wanderers” album release tour through Austria and Germany and we attended the last two shows in Siegburg and Frankfurt / Main. Before the show we had the chance (through VIP tickets) to spend some time with the guys. They asked us how we like the new videos and the whole location. Thomas and Dushi told us that someone visited the place of the video location and found a drumstick there, but it was surely not the stick that was thrown away. We felt challenged by them and we considered the whole evening if we should do our next motorcycle tour, which should already start two weeks later, to Austria to find this stick or not.
After the concert we made a decision: We wanted to keep up this challenge and wanted to try to find this lost stick.
Confident of victory we told the band after the show that we are going to find this stick, not expecting for ourselves that we will really find it. All of them smirked believing we were just joking and said we should be careful as the area is very inaccessible. We said goodbye and already made plans for our upcoming trip to Austria when we went back to our car.
And slowly we realized what we were getting into…
The next week we spent some time to research where exactly the video location was, where exactly the place could be where Thomas threw the drumstick, etc. As we checked the videos again and look for additional pictures we knew this challenge would fail, but nevertheless we wanted to go there and want to see where VoA shot their videos.

“Set Sails!
This is the day
Stars align to show you the way”

– lyrics “A Journey To Remember” by Clémentine Delauney

Okay, we have to admit the stars did not align our way to Austria when we started our journey on September 9th, 2019 in the morning. Much worse, it rained. And it rained the whole time we drove from Germany through Czech Republic, to Austria. 9 HOURS JUST RAIN. But when we crossed the Austrian border it suddenly stopped and we had the perfect timing to enjoy the sunset over the skyline of Vienna. But our way didn’t end in Vienna. We had a wonderful accommodation, Traumstube Joschi, in Kapfenberg, where we arrived at 8³⁰ p.m. We just wanted to go to bed and rest after around 13,5 hours on our motorcycles.

On the next day, September 10th, we start our real adventure for which we came to Styria. We woke up pretty early in the morning and were totally excited what this day will has in store for us. From our accommondation to Aflenz were just around 16 km. We enjoyed this ride a lot as it was a curvy route through mountains and woods. Also the sun was shining and for this season it was pretty warm. In short, we had a lot of fun! But at some point all fun comes to an end.
Arrived in Aflenz, we drove up to the last parking lot at the pasture to shorten our way, before we had to hike the last kilometers. This way was made out of gravel, stones, a lot of potholes and tight curves. Worse case scenario for motorbikers (as long as you don’t have a cross motorcycle)! Thanks to this street Julia had to bring her motorcycle to a motorbike workshop the next day because the chain had loosened and had to be retightened. Fortunately, it wasn’t a big deal.
After hiking up the mountain we finally saw the beautiful landscape of the music videos with its little lake, its cliffs and a lot of cows. We were overwhelmed. After looking around for a few minutes and enjoying the view, we set out to find the specific locations we knew from the videos. Melli had a cool photo idea. She printed a few screenshots of “A Journey To Remember” on paper so we could search for the places and tried to fit the picture into the landscape.

Finally we also found the place where Thomas threw the drumstick into the valley. We looked down, in hope we would see the stick from above but of course we saw just a lot of rocks and nothing else. But we spotted a little, let’s say “way” (it wasn’t a real way more a risky possibility to climb down), so we tried our luck step by step. But we quickly realized that what we were doing there was really dangerous and after Melli got hurt a bit on her hand we decided to break off the challenge. So we climbed back up, a little sad that we had made it down there and couldn’t find anything, when Melli suddenly started screaming “OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD!” We both couldn’t believe our eyes! Wedged between a little tree laid Thomas’ drumstick! After a short minute of trying to understand what happened, Melli put the stick in her bag and we climbed up the rest of the way to finally found safe ground under our feet again. We could hardly believe that we found it!
During the hike back to our motorbikes we informed Clémentine that we really found the stick. She congratulated us and asked us for a picture to share it on VoA’s socials. And of course we did! (It was actually the first time we showed our faces in connection with our fanpage, haha!)
On the following day we saw these stories on Visions Of Atlantis’ Instagram account:

The rest of our vacation was not as spectacular as the first two days. We drove through some wonderful landscapes in Austria and Germany before we ended our trip at home.
The first concert we went to together after this trip was on October 18th in Erfurt, Germany. And we brought our trophy with us. We asked the band to sign the stick and of course they did. This brought up the topic again and we were asked about details of our trip by VoA and we proudly told everything they asked for. Everyone was clearly impressed and said in a nice way we were crazy. That wasn’t something new for us, as we know for ourselves we are, haha!

Thank you for reading and as reward you can watch our video with some original clips of our trip below, hehe!