Transitional Woman's Excellent Adventure

The plane flew low over the flatlands neatly marked into individual fields where crops had grown this summer.  I was feeling a little nervous, but not due to flying (which I love) but because I was going to spend five days with a group of women I'd never met.

I was venturing into the unimaginable.  I was going on an internet meet up.  My sons thought it was a little crazy and when I asked why, they responded, "What would you say if we told you that we were going to meet up with strangers we met on the internet?"

Point taken.

This past spring I wrote about virtual friendships, wondering if they were as real as flesh and blood friendships.  I was about to find out.

Drawn together by our common faith in Christ and love of fiber arts, we met in the middle of the country to laugh, pray, play with our yarn, eat, eat some more, and finally put a face to the name, a voice to the words we see on screen and  find out if these women are really like the women we've learned to know from online chatting.

I could bore you with all sorts of anecdotes about Brenda or Peggy or Joanne how they were like or unlike what I imagined, but the real point is virtual friends can be real friends.

Meeting them face to face only cemented the friendships formed online.  We already know so much about each others lives that we weren't strangers, just friends who hadn't met yet.

We were a mixed bag of women though, from 20s to 50s (our group has women from their teens to 70s, but. sadly, many couldn't come) from all over the country (our European sisters couldn't make it either), with lifetimes of vastly different experiences.

But did we have fun?  I do not have the words.  Did we laugh?  Harder then ever in our lives.  Did our bonds grow stronger and tighter?  More than I could have imagined.

So my excellent adventure was all I could have hoped for and more and I was sorrier than I can say when it was time to head for home.  However, there's always next year and I plan to be the first to sign up.