Finally Met My Penpal After 23 Years!

I started writing to my penpal 23 years ago, and just now finally got to meet him! I’m American. He’s British. Neither of us can believe we finally met in person.

Here’s the backstory. When I was in high school (circa 1995), the internet was a pretty new thing. I was on a dial-up modem, so download speeds were really slow and I would get frustrated waiting for web pages to load. So I found myself hanging out in chat rooms, since text loads much more quickly. I somehow came across someone who had The Acorn Group listed in their signature. I looked up The Acorn Group and found a page that had mini bios of its members…all British as I recall.

I thought to myself that it would be fun to have a penpal in another country. So I picked several people and sent them emails to introduce myself and see if anyone else was interested in having a penpal. Several of them wrote back a few times, but Tim (who went by Mit at the time) was the one who stuck. He kept writing. I kept writing.

We wrote for many years (4? I can’t remember) and then lost touch. I didn’t hear from him for, I don’t know, maybe 15 years. Then one day about 5 years ago he tracked me down on Facebook and we reconnected. We got each other caught up on our life happenings over those missed years and were back on track.

Tim came out to the US for conferences a few times but was far enough away that my family and I couldn’t get down to see him. And then…SteemFest 3 happened. My husband Luke and I decided to take the whole family out to SteemFest in Krakow, Poland. Luke has been working on a big project with a group of people in England, so we decided to tack a few days onto our SteemFest trip to swing through England and meet up with those folks.

Tim was able to take a day off work to come meet up with us, and we had a lovely day hanging out with him before meeting up with Luke’s people. Unfortunately, Tim’s wife and kids weren’t able to join us, but Tim got to meet my whole family. So fun to FINALLY get to meet my friend from across the pond after all these years :)