What in the name of Christ was going on? Had I finally lost my mind, or was it all just a dream? I had friends who told me it was time to quit watching my favourite show, when I started to dream about them, but I wasn't going to listen. They said vampires belonged in nightmares, not daydreams. That's crazy!

Disclaimer: It's quite obvious that I don't own The Vampire Diaries, credits goes to Lisa, but more even to Julie, Kevin and their writers, crew and cast of the show who really makes the story come alive. I just had some fun with their characters and invented Emma to play with them for a while. Enjoy!

The trip of a lifetime

My whole body tingled from excitement as the plane landed in Atlanta. It had been a long journey from Sweden but I was so excited when I was finally here.

I had been a fan of the Vampire Diaries for a couple of years now, and had wanted to do this trip a long time. My friend Anna and I were supposed to go together but she suddenly got sick, and had to have her appendix removed, so I had to go by myself.

It wasn't like I was totally helpless on my own; I had made trips on my own before, like when I studied English at Oxford foe a year. You learn not to be afraid for the unknown and that's a good thing when you're just 23 years of age.

Anna was devastated and would have done everything if she hadn't been in the hospital. We were supposed to go to Atlanta to check out the locations for our favourite TV-show, and we had done extensive research before it was time to go all the way across the Atlantic sea.

The first day I tried just to look around in town. We had booked a tour with the Vampire Stalkers, but it wasn't until a couple of days later, and until then I wanted to learn as much as I could about this lovely town.

I was checking out the town church when I saw a poster for a tour where you could check out old houses and their gardens. I immediately recognized "the Salvatore Boarding-house" from my favourite show; even thou the poster said it was Glenridge Hall.

It was a really nice tour where you were given certain destinations where you could wander around the gardens with your camera. It was mostly elders with a garden interest, but there were a few younger who was rather looking at the buildings, like me.

We took our own cars, or in my case, a rental, to get around in the small towns and villages around Covington. This estate was extra interesting, because the architecture was so different from the Scandinavian design I was used to, but I was mostly fascinated because I had seen it so many times on my TV at home.

My whole body tickled of excitement as I walked up the driveway and caught eye of the big brown house with bond timber details and all its angles.

It felt amazing to walk around this garden along with a bunch of old people that was mostly interested in the green scrubs and plats. Quite a few people was more interested in the buildings, like me and it was fun to find all this people sitting in garden furniture and taking pictures of themselves and the construction from different angles. A younger couple stopped to discuss architecture with me. They were easy to talk to and had a lot of interesting opinions, and before the day was over we had gotten a lot of laughs together. It got really interesting when this man, Joseph came and started to tell us more about the architecture. He was the owner of the house and knew obviously everything about it.

When we left this magic place I turned around and glanced around at this amazing building. A movement in one of the windows upstairs drew my attention, the curtain was cautiously drawn to the side and a man watched us leave.

What?

It couldn't have been Ian Somerhalder, but it sure looked like him.

I smiled and turned around and left the estate with the rest of the group. I guess my friends was right, I was a little too obsessed with the Vampire Diaries. I needed to get a grip!