A summary

It's been a week since I returned home to Brighton after completing The Great Euro Freebie Challenge. I'm now trying to get my head down a bit and work on writing the book that will hopefully entertain many people before too long.
Since I got home I've had quite a few people asking me about the challenge, what it was all about, where I went, how I got around, and lots of other similar questions. So, I've decided to write this little piece here explaining a bit about the challenge that I undertook.

On the 1st November last year I flew on a one-way ticket from London to Stockholm without a single penny or credit card in my pocket. I was completely 100% skint.
That in itself is a situation that most people would go out of their way not to find themselves in. That's nothing!
I'd set myself a challenge not to return home to England until I'd been to every European Union capital city that wasn't on an island. I wouldn't be allowed to receive or use any cash along the way, but I would be allowed to accept any other kind of help offered.

The question you're probably asking yourselves right now is "Why?"
The whole thing came about as a response to my aunt Susan's battle with cancer, a battle that sadly she lost on 9th November 2007. My mission was to raise as much money as possible through sponsorships for Cancer Research UK.

I'll be honest with you, I was quite disappointed with the final amount raised, £1632.50 at the last count. Don't get me wrong, I know that any amount made for a good cause is worth a little suffering, but the thing that really gets to me is that a challenge that I had to suffer and struggle through for 5 and a half months didn't even make 2 grand, whereas people run the London Marathon for charity and make thousands in sponsorships.
If given the choice of training and then running a marathon, or hiking along Eastern European motorways in the winter with no food or money, almost freezing to death, I know which I'd opt for.
Not to take anything at all away from people who run the marathon, I just wish that more people had known about what I was doing and that we could've made a bit more.

Anyway, back to the challenge.
By the end of the first week of the journey I'd managed to get to 4 capitals, Stockholm, Oslo (non-EU but I ended up thanks to random happenings), Copenhagen, and Berlin.
I'd stayed with some people from couchsurfing, as well as with a brother of a friend made, and had even had a free night in a youth hostel. Only later, when talking to a member of staff, did I find out that an Australian guy I'd met in the train station had actually paid for my bed but didn't even want me to know. It was a completely selfless act and something that I'll always remember and think of if ever there's someone in need of something that I can give.
Travelling between the cities so far hadn't been as difficult as I'd imagined it would be. The Scandinavians were making my life easy. I could ride on trains for free, all I ahd to do was explain my situation and show them a copy of the newspaper that proved I was telling the truth.
The Scandi train guards would simply laugh, say something like "I've never seen anything like this in my life" and then tell me to take a seat on the train and not to worry about any checks.
It was all too easy. Surely it wouldn't continue like this. Would it?
No!

Once into Germany I tried the same technique but the Germans were having none of it.
"Travel for free? Not in my country!" They'd say, before either giving me a fine that'd be sent to a false address, or kicking me off of the train in some destitute little shit-hole like Frankfurt Oder, a horrible little town on the German side of the border with Poland.
On a rainy, grey, freezing cold evening I walked for a couple of hours into Poland and finally found a motorway from where I could hitch-hike to the town of Poznan.
2 hours later and a lorry finally pulled over to let me know I was standing on the wrong side of the road and that all these cars were coming FROM Poznan.
I crossed the motorway but still hadn't been picked up an hour later, and now it was pitch black, even colder, and I was starving.
I walked back towards the town of Slubice, and found that there was one train a night leaving to Poznan. I had to get on it. The guard couldn't speak any English, and my Polish isn't what it used to be (haha), so rather than waste my time trying to explain my situation, I managed to get through to him that I'd been robbed and had no money on me. This was only possible because I spent three years in Slovenia and managed to pick up quite a bit of the language, and was very happy to find on this trip that knowledge of any slavic language is invaluable in Eastern Europe.
Anyway, I had never planned to use this method to get around, but I realised on that evening that in certain places it'd be the best and easiest way of getting from A to B.

Into Poland things started to get difficult and it then dawned on me that completing this challenge wasn't going to be anywhere near as easy as it had first promised to be.
The task of finding enough food to survive on was proving to be the hardest thing, so when I got invited round to the house of an Indian restuarant owner in Warsaw for a proper hot meal, I truly jumped at the chance.
it turned out to be a bad decision.
His food gave me Salmonella!

As if I hadn't lost enough weight already, I was now in state that meant even if I had the opportunity to eat, I wasn't able to.
I was able to make my way from Warsaw to Cracow where I had some friends that I used to do a bit of work for. The Cracow-Life team took good care of me, got me to a doctor, and even gave me my own flat to recover in. Finally I was fit and ready to carry on.
I found myself working (unpaid of course) as a motivational speaker at A 3-day AIESEC conference in Slovakia, which meant that at least I didn't have to worry about where my next meal was coming from or where I was going to sleep.
Some of the AISEC members then took me under their wing and helped me to get through the country and into Austria.
From there I went down to my old home, Slovenia, and from there to another of my old homes, Rome. From there back up to Slovenia for christmas, then down to Serbia, Bulgaria, and then Romania. It was on arrival in Bucharest that I'd made a big error.
"Hi Kris. Nice to meet you. I guess you've just come from Greece and then Bulgaria, right?"
"Um. Greece. Hmmm. I forgot about Greece."
I knew then that at some point in the trip, probably at the end, I'd have to make it all the way south again down to Greece. I'd had a horrible time in Bulgaria, mostly because of the weather and the conditions of the streets and so on, and there was no way that I was going to go back through there at that point in the trip!
I stayed a little while in Romania, and completely fell in love with the country thanks to the kindness of the people there and the support that they continued to give me long after I'd left their land.
I went from Romania to Hungary, back to Slovenia, to Switzerland, then through France to Spain, and on to Portugal where I was well taken care of by Romanian and Spanish friends. It was so warm in Spain that I foolishly left my coat there, too heavy to carry.
During this time I met some truly amazing people who helped me out in a big way, not least when I found myself stranded in a little French village called Amberieu at 11 in the evening. I hadn't eaten all day, and was freezing. After finding a pub that would let me use the phone to call someone in Lyon who was expecting me to let them know I wasn't going to make it until the morning, that person spoke to the pub owner and after giving his credit card details arranged for me to sleep in a room above the bar.
It was little acts of kindness like this that kept me going.

I made it up to Paris, then on to Luxembourg, Brussels, and Amsterdam. From there my aim was to get to Dresden in Eastern Germany, but once again I got stuck in a small town, Fulda, in the middle of the night, and once again I was helped out in a big way by some strangers. This time it was a young couple who just approached me because I looked like I needed help. They took me to their home, gave me some food, and gave me a place to sleep for the night.
From there I finally got to Dresden, then Prague (where yet more Romanians took care of me), then up to Warsaw again.
From Warsaw things were tough, as I walked for hours along the motorway, finally hitching a lift from a nice lorry driver who took me to Vilnius in Lithuania.
From Vilnius was even tougher as I walked through snow blizzards for hours, carrying all the bags, as drivers went past laughing. One guy was kind enough to give me a small lift, then give me a bottle of brandy.
The brandy came in useful later in the day when I had to use it as payment for a Polish guy to let me ride with him to Riga. He didn't take me to Riga, exactly. He dropped me in a forest outside of Latvia's capital shortly before midnight as the snow came down like nobody's business. Remember I was coatless.
I walked and walked and walked some more, before finally making it to a petrol station and finding some guys who'd been snowboarding all day and were now driving to Riga.
I went from Riga to Tallinn and then was fortunate enough to stay with a really decent who sorted me out with a ferry ticket over the water to Helsinki.
Now I'd been on the road for 5 months and was well and truly knackered. All I wanted to do was get home to England to get some rest and start trying to put on the stone in weight that I'd lost through not being able to eat enough.
One capital was left on the challenge. Athens!
How would I hitch-hike all the way down from Finland to Greece? My body wasn't up to it. I wanted to be done.
As I searched for a solution, my saviour came in the form of Donatello restaurant in Brighton. They were willing to sponsor me by providing me with an air ticket from Helsinki to Athens.
And so I completed my journey in the hot Spring time sun of Greece's capital.
My flight home was provided by my uncle Michael and his green-grocers in Brighton, Proto's.

I'd been on the road without any money for 165 days, had visited 26 capital cities, and had travelled 9763 miles (over 15000 kilometres), but I'd done what I set out to do and had proved the doubters wrong.

Now that you've read this and know what i went through, please go that one step further and make a small sponsorship by clicking here. Every single penny goes directly to Cancer Research UK thanks to Justgiving.com who take care of everything.

Come on, make my struggle a bit more worthwhile!