4. Of Alice and the Angels

Sometime after Lyndie’s disappointing cruise, she and I took a road trip together from Wyoming to Texas. I would visit my grandchildren. She would have an opportunity — perhaps her last — to see her blind friend again.

That was the first time I saw Lyndie up close and personal with others. I saw that she blessed nearly everyone she encountered in the same way she so often blesses me, making me feel special and, somehow, sanctified.

She didn’t just say thank you to motel clerks and cashiers. She wished them a blessed day or some special moment of grace or kindness before they finished their shift. It made me regret that I don’t always do that.

In a Mexican restaurant in Lamar, Colorado, in response to an open question from Lyndie, the waitstaff suddenly wanted to tell her all about their lives — and she wanted to listen. This delayed our progress, but Lyndie was delighted to hear their stories.

One evening she engaged my 6-year-old grandson in an extended conversation about geology and evolution. Normally he wouldn’t spend much time at anything but video games or jumping on the trampoline. But for some reason he listened seriously to my elderly friend, a relative stranger, who clearly wanted to know what he thought.

Perhaps this explains why I became willing to get myself involved in restoring Lyndie’s dream, and why I continue to devote time to that cause. If anyone deserves a payback for misfortune, she does, and if I can help to accomplish it, I will.

Here’s how it came about.

Many months after our own Viking cruise, my husband and I reconnected with a couple we had befriended on the boat. At dinner in a New Mexico restaurant, I recounted what had happened to Lyndie. “Why don’t you launch a crowd-funding campaign to buy her the same cruise again?” suggested my new friend Alice. “I would give $100!”

I did, and she did, as one of the first contributors to the Lyndie Fund on the crowd-funding site Angelink.com.

Of course I spoke to Lyndie about the campaign before I launched into all this. It had never occurred to her that she might be able to take the trip again. Astonished and grateful, she soon became determined to see it through. “I want to finish what I started!” she said. “I want to take those excursions and meet all those people that I didn’t meet the first time!”

Lyndie’s close friends were not the only donors. People still living in Dubois who remember her chipped in, as did many of my own friends who read her story. We tried to appeal for small donations, like $5, but most – like Alice, and others who had never heard of Lyndie – chose to give much more.

By far the largest single donation came from Viking River Cruises itself, which contributed $2,000 to the cost of her repeat voyage along the Danube.  And a travel agent who moved away from Dubois after knowing Lyndie here offered help.

I used up a huge bag of chocolate chips “inherited” from my daughter when she relocated, as well as fruit from my freezer, and ran a bake sale at the local farmer’s market for a few weeks to boost the Lyndie Fund. Several more neighbors gave generous donations.

So Lyndie paid a small deposit to book another cruise from Budapest to Bucharest, this one at the end of March 2025, accompanied by a friend who was eager to come along at her own expense. Lyndie would pay for her trip insurance from her own funds, as well as whatever we could not raise.

Then, only days before we had to pay Viking the balance, came a bolt from the blue. Her friend did not have enough money for her own part of the fee, and had to back out. After all the donations, Lyndie would have had to chip in only about $500 to make up the $4047 balance. With the added single supplement, the fee had now inflated to nearly $6,600 – about $2,500 more than we had bargained for.

There was still time to cancel, but by now Lyndie was determined.

“I have no plan whatever to cancel my participation in the cruise,” she wrote in an email to our travel agent. How would we reach that balance? She would “simply write a check for that remaining $2,464.77 out of savings, PAY Viking and be done with it,” she wrote me. “ I can catch up with my savings via my famously frugal lifestyle over the next 20 years … at least till I do that skydive at 104 yrs.”

So there we are. After spending nearly all her savings on the devastating first cruise, she has now withdrawn more than $3,000 from what was left. The “famously frugal” Outrageous Older Woman could end her life with almost nothing in the bank as she approaches her 90^th birthday.

In a few weeks, I will drive her from her home in Laramie and deliver her to the United Airlines gate in Denver, where she will be met by an agent with a wheelchair. If all goes as planned and requested, she should be transported via wheelchair and airplane all the way to the exit doors in Budapest, where she will be met by Viking River Cruise agents with banners.

This account is a thank-you to the many who have already donated, and an appeal to others who might. Whoever you are, please keep reading (and share this with your friends). There is so much more to tell!

You’ll read about how Lyndie was branded a “perverse” artist and practiced brutal murders at play during childhood, about her adventures as a young mother living in a New York City tenement in 1960, and how she learned to live in poverty like the Franciscans when she was (inadvertently) left penniless in their founder’s home town during her first trip to Europe. Finally, you will enjoy the journal that she has been writing as she drifts along on her next journey down the Danube.