When the Norwich pilgrimage was over and the Pilgrim Sisters, as we referred to ourselves, had returned home, I stayed on at the Guesthouse. One evening when I returned to the kitchen for tea, Astrid

appeared sipping a glass of red wine. “Are you one of the Florida group”? She already knew the answer by my accent. Earlier in the week, a fourteen-year-old girl had begged her father to talk with me because she had never met an American. As soon as I said “Hello”, she gushed:“I love your accent”! Clearly, I could not be totally incognito in this part of the world. As I browsed the tea selection, Astrid was asking  where I lived in the States. She caught my attention when she said she knew exactly where on that large peninsula of Florida the historic fifteenth century city of St. Augustine was located. “I ended my cross country bike trip there”, she said. I stopped looking at the tea selection to ask: “Where did you bike from?” “I started in Alaska''. “When”? “About ten years ago”. Astrid had silver-gray hair, like mine. I had more questions: “How long did it take”? “Altogether, I biked for two years from here in England across the world, ending in th U.S”. “Did you do this on your own''? Her crystal clear blue eyes lit up: “Yes. Yes, I did.” I didn’t ask, but wanted to know how old she was at the time. “Have you written a book”? She said she had not intended to do so, but she had met so many nice people on the way that she wanted to share those stories. “The media always tells the other side. But, I met wonderful people everywhere I went”. Her words rang true for me there in Norwich. The “Friends of Julian”, the innkeeper, the local cafe owner, had all welcomed me with open arms.  After our conversation, I noticed the bicycle parked in the laundry room. Astrid had biked from London and stopped at the Inn for a night on her way to her brother’s house somewhere in the south. The next morning, she was as fresh and excited as the teen who had oozed all that youthful energy. We wished each other safe “onward journeys”. Immediately, I downloaded Astrid’s book to my e-reader. She is indeed another person on the way whose true life story had got me thinking about life choices and decisions. Who else would be coming to the Inn? I asked Josiah, the innkeeper.

Only one large group from a few towns away who had studied Julian would come to stay briefly. Then, “You’ll have the place all to yourself”. “”Yippee”, I said. Although that was exactly how I would prefer it, I knew the chance meetings had enriched me and each in their own way mattered to my own experience.

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