Although this is about Lyndie’s journey, in a sense it starts with me, so that is where we will begin.
My husband and I had planned something very special for our 50th anniversary: A Viking River Cruise along the Danube from Budapest to Bucharest, traveling through Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania – a region we wanted to visit but not, at our age and in this troubled era, on our own.
One winter day in 2023, when I called Lyndie as I sometimes do to keep in touch after she moved away from Dubois, the subject came up in an unexpected way.
I was not the one to raise it. Lyndie was heady with excitement and big news: She’d booked a cruise down the Danube with an old friend who lived in Texas–also a widow, who is now blind with glaucoma.
“You won’t believe this,” I said. “We’re taking the same cruise, a month earlier.”
I knew that Lyndie, who is in her 80s, is almost literally as poor as a church mouse. “It’s awfully expensive,” I said. “How are you able to afford it?”
“It will use up almost all of my savings,” she said, with her ironic laugh, “but I don’t care. Send me to the poor house afterwards. Let me use up all my Medicare and go untreated for some illness later. It doesn’t matter. This is going to be my last adventure, and it will be worth it.”
She said the plan was to become the eyes for her blind friend, describing in words whatever her friend could not perceive by sound or smell. They had spent so many days traveling together over the years, and they wanted to share this extraordinary journey. Perhaps it would be their last.
As I tramped the streets of Budapest and Belgrade and gazed from our stateroom window while we floated down the Danube, I imagined Lyndie seeing those same sights a month later and describing them to her blind friend. I was eager to share memories with her afterwards, during our next phone call.
When we returned, I waited for her to phone me. And waited.
After many weeks, long past the date when she should have reached home and increasingly worried, I finally decided to phone her.
“So how was it?” I asked. She paused before answering.
“It was horrible,” she said. “It was a disaster.”
* * *
What follows is the story of Lyndie’s journey – not only of what took place during her own sad adventure, but also of who she is and what led her to gamble her life savings in that way. It is also about my own journey, discovering far more than I knew before about the extraordinary life story of my friend and coming to love her even more. The account draws on many emails and the letters she wrote to me, in the kind of careful handwriting that must be lost forever in our age of keyboards.
Not only will you follow me and Lyndie down the Danube a few years ago, but you will take the same journey again with fresh eyes, as she relives the adventure in (we hope) a happier way. Those who already know Lyndie can expect to learn more of her remarkable history here, and those who don’t will meet a person well worth knowing.
Together, we offer you a travelogue through time and space. Enjoy the journey.
Lyndie's Journey 