Trudy Veenstar never doubted the possibility of having a life beyond the end of a long marriage after her dearest partner passed away, she just never imagined it would come so soon.
81-year-old Veenstar spent the most memorable moments of her life traveling around the world with her husband, Auke Veenstar, who died at age 89 in April of last year. She preparing to carry the torch of their marital legacy onto the African continent, where the two either rarely or had never visited, when, in a turn quite unexpected, she fell in with a group of ladies who would become dear friends.
She decided to book a two-and-a-half-week safari around Kenya in February 2024. She had hardly concluded the first day when she hitched her lone wagon to a group of tourists and forged a special bond with them, most of all with Melisa Boddie, a TV executive from Denver who was also on the safari.
“As much as I missed including my husband in the planning, I am a traveler and I have always had it in me; I was so ready to get back out traveling,” Veenstar said. “The 32-hour flight was daunting but as I say ‘no pain, no gain’.”
Veenstar and her husband traveled extensively around the world, hitting Nepal, Bangkok, Myanmar, and Cambodia in Southeast Asia, and also South America and Europe.
As curious as she was to see what solo travel was like, she didn’t get to experience it for long. After just a few short hours, she met Boddie.
“I was eating breakfast and a woman asked if I minded her sitting with us for breakfast. That is when we learned that her husband died a year prior and this was her first trip without him,” Boddie told the British news outlet SWNS.
“We ended up meeting other people in the group, much older than me in their 70s and 80s. Trudy is a lovely woman, she is so funny and so lovely.”
During the trip, the group of friends who have nicknamed themselves the ‘Kenyan cousins’ visited all the national parks and saw much of the wildlife there.
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Trudy said she did not expect to leave with a group of friends but she is happy she has.
“I never expected to leave with such a close group of friends, never expected to form such a bond with them.”
They are also trying to arrange another group holiday together but as Trudy is so well-traveled they are finding it difficult to find a place she hasn’t yet been to.
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“We are all wanting to plan another trip together, we are going to the Galapagos Islands but Trudy has been before so she isn’t coming.”
After the trip ended, the group vowed the stay in touch and now have monthly FaceTime calls to stay connected.
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