I always wanted to start my own blog and this three weeks backpacking trip couchsurfing style I feel is the best opportunity to do it.

I wanted to make a tour in Europe visiting places related with World War II since many years ago. A special situation pushed me to buy a ticket to Latvia and around ten days before my travel the plans changed for reasons totally out of my control making me to be stuck with a trip I was not interested to do anymore.

On those days I was changing my mind almost every day about going or not. Finally I decided to make an event in Facebook to collect opinions from my friends about what to do and where to go in Europe.

I got dozens of messages with wonderful ideas and I started posting pins in a Google Map to make a possible route for my travel.

Originally I was planning to visit some friends in Finland after my visit to Latvia and coming back from Göteburg, Sweden where I have another friend but having a complete make-over of my plan I decided to go South instead of going North, visiting now Lithuania, Poland, Germany and Sweden. All by land starting in Riga and finishing in Göteburg.

On June 27, 2008, I took my flight in Jacksonville, Florida, driving from Gainesville. It is just 1.5 hours but I was felling I was coming late and I do no recommend driving like that when you were not able to sleep at all the night before.

The night before I could not sleep because I was trying to find a place to stay in Riga using Couchsurfing.com on the last minute, because I did not have an answer to the request I sent few days before.

In my flight to Atlanta finally I could find a moment to read the Eastern Europe Lonely Planet Guide finding finally the bus companies to go to Warsaw directly from Riga. Just few days before I spent long time just looking for that information in internet. This flight was a great opportunity to sleep at least one hour.

Waiting in Atlanta’s Airport for my connection to Vienna the airline offered $400 + hotel + meals, for those who wanted to stay overnight departing on the next day. I took advantage of this opportunity to get part of my December’s ticket to Panama.

Having time to visit the city I went to downtown in the evening. My first impression of Atlanta was not nice. All I saw is huge skyscrapers with the surrounding streets crowded with people selling things in the sidewalks and also a lot of people asking for money.

After five minutes outside the MARTA station at Five Points a man with around 60 years old came to me to tell me that was dangerous to walk there after 7 (actually when he told me that was around 7:45pm). He asked me to buy him something to it and after doing it I decided to return ASAP to the hotel before was going to get dark.