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!

written by Melli & Julia

Our second trip to the beautiful waterfall of “The Last Home”

After we found the waterfall in September 2018 complete dried out (you can find the full story here) we wanted to see this beautiful place with water, so we decided to do a second trip to France. But this time without our motorcycles, but with the car of Julias parents. An old Volkswagen Sharan. We could sleep in it and made a great road trip through Western and Southern France.
We started our trip on May 11th, 2019 and nearly drove the whole way in one day. On the next day, May 12th, we visited the wonderful place. This time we had no trouble finding it, not only because we knew where the path was, but also because we could hear the waterfall from afar.

Overwhelmed by the beauty, we completely forgot the time.
After we got back to our car, we drove to Lyon. In this city we spent 2 days (including a metal concert which was promoted by Clémentines company) before we continue our trip through France. We visited the cities of Carcassonne (a fantastic oldcastle), Montpellier, Marseille and Toulouse. We also wanted to visit Paris, but our car put a spoke in our wheel. So we were forced to stay in Toulouse longer than we actually wanted. Luckly, the car workshop could repair the car after a few days, so we made it to Visions Of Atlantis’ show in Haarlem, Netherlands on May 24th. And with this show our (little annoying) route trip ended.
Thank you for reading!

written by Melli & Julia

Yes, we found the original location where Visions Of Atlantis shoot the music video “The Last Home”!

First of all we have to clear some things: 1. We found this place by accident (how you will read in the article) and 2. NO, we won’t say exactly where this place is!
But from the beginning … In August 2018 we started to plan our first long motorcycle tour. We decided to drive to France, more precisely to Lyon. We didn’t want to drive on the highway the whole time and searched for some interesiting roads with some nice spots we maybe could visit. As both of us love nature and mountains we ended up with the idea of searching for national parks (especially with waterfalls) where we could hike and some mountain roads. We found pictures of some nice spots which we wanted to visit.

On September 4th, 2018 VoA released their music video for “The Last Home” through Napalm Records official YouTube channel. When we watched the video for the first time we even didn’t realized that the waterfall in this video is one of those on our list. Later in the month, we planned the exact route of our tour and sort out which places we wanted to visit. And suddenly we realized that one of these waterfalls is the one from the video. So our decision was clear. We wanted to find it!

On September 19th, 2018 we started our ~1200 km trip to Lyon. We needed two days before we arrived at a camping ground near the city. It was the first time for us driving our motorcycles in a forgein country and it was also the first time that we drove 8 hours two days in a row. We were pretty exhausted, but also excited about the next day we went sightseeing in Lyon. Due to our strict tour plans, as we didn’t have much time, we left Lyon the next day, September 22nd and went to the secret place of the video. We knew the exact location through Google Maps, but finding it turned out to be more difficult than we thought. The place was so well hidden that we had actually given up on finding it. We made a break next to the street where the waterfall should be. We couldn’t hear anything and see even less. We expected a small way or something similar, but didn’t find it. Right before we wanted to leave Julia spotted a very little path between the trees. It was really narrow and quite steep, but we took on the challenge of hiking down there with all our motorcycle clothing.
And there it was! The place of “The Last Home”. But the little river and also the waterfall was completly dry. That’s why we couldn’t hear the water. But nevertheless, the place was such as beautiful as in the video even without water.

After we spent a bit time there we got back to our motorbikes and continue our trip through France before we arrived on September 26th safly at home.
Since we’ve seen a lot of people asked Clémentine in comments on Instagram and Facebook where this place is and she only replied that it is near Lyon, we don’t want to divulge where this place is either. Particulary because this place is so well hidden. Thanks for your understanding and thank you for reading!