It’s Thursday 31:st of July. We, Dechas from Stockholm, are packed and ready to go on the biggest tour we have ever done. The cruise ship “Baltic Kristina” will take us from Stockholm, Sweden to Riga, the capital of Latvia. From there we will travel by car, bus and train to the five different concert spots set up for us. The first two dates are to be held at two different festivals in Balvi and Madona in Latvia. After that it’s off to Germany to play in Chemnitz and Berlin before finishing the tour off by playing at the Emergenza finals 2003 in Taubertal. This was basically the tour plan… We met each other up at the harbor in Stockholm, things were feeling great! We had been waiting the whole summer for this moment to come and when we finally got aboard the ship…Stockholm, where we have our regular jobs and school, didn’t seem to exist anymore. Now it was just two weeks of pure fun ahead of us. We sat down and talked about the whole thing over a couple of beers, and after a while we really sank our teeth into the fact that we were doing this for real, we were going to play in front of thousands of people, make lots of new friends and have a great time! Our instruments were fixed and fine tuned in preparation for the tour, tickets were booked, routes were planned, demos, posters and promotion was taken care of. All we needed to do was to travel and step up on a stage to do what we love the most; play our music. The boat arrived at Riga seaport at about 11.00 am. Here we met up with Claes Nordling, our tour manager from Swedish showcase. The festival Arrangers had sent two drivers for us that were to take us to the hotel in Madona, about 150 kilometers south east of Riga. We packed our stuff in one of the cars and split up. Hakim (singer), Martin (drums) and Claes sat in one car. Joel (guitar), Jacob (guitar) and me (being Georgios the bass player) sat in the second car. We were off to Madona! With about 50 kilometers left to go our driver stops and says “problem”. He explains in every way he can that he lost sight of the others who were just behind us a minute earlier. Before we even think about what could have gone wrong, Jacob gets a message from Claes on his cell phone. “We had a car accident. Tell your driver to turn back”. About one kilometer back two cars have stopped by the side of the road, black tire marks on the asphalt show that a car has driven out in the ditch by the road, about two meters deep. It’s them! The first thing I see is that the car is totally thrashed and there are demo records and parts of our luggage scattered all over the place. From here, every second felt like a lifetime, how is everyone? And what should I expect? I see Martin getting up from the ditch, he seems to be ok. The car was driving in about 100km/h so seeing Martin in one piece is a relief. Nothing broken no big wounds…just a pain in the neck and of course chock. The two who sat in the front seats. The tour manager Claes, and the driver seem to be ok as well. The driver sits in one of the stopped cars…crying. Claes stands by the car wreck, and by his feet lay Hakim. Time stops for a moment. How bad is it? Is he alive? He moves! He’s alive, but badly hurt. There are no broken bones, no external wounds and he can move his toes and fingers...but he’s in terrible pain and all we can do is wait for the ambulance to come. What we first thought was a couple of broken ribs, later turned out to be a ruptured spleen and a damaged kidney. Hakim spent the rest of the day in surgery. At around midnight we finally got to meet the doctors who tell us that Hakim’s situation is stabile and that he will have to stay for about a week in the hospital. We spent the next couple of days on the phone speaking to the Swedish and Finnish embassy’s (Hakim is a Finnish citizen), SOS international, insurance companies and of course our parents and friends. Out priorities changed to say the least. The tour plan was no more, we went from thinking about the Em