Aged 13 I got a very special penfrien, old Jenny from an island outside Tromsø. I met her through a radio program, and we corresponded regularly for many, many years.
In May 1977 I passed my student exams, and aged 19 I was ready for my very first solo travel. I had travelled with friends before, even abroad, and later the same summer I was to go to London with a friend for two weeks, but now I was totally on my own. Old Jenny in Tromsø and her miniature red cabin was my goal.
I took the plane up to Tromsø, quite an experience, and through letters we had planned that Jenny should meet me at the airport. But no Jenny was there. I had her phone number (this was the age before cell phones) and tried to call her several times, but without any luck.
After feeling very lonely for some time, and after alot of hesitation, I phoned home. "What shall I do. I am here at the airport at a place far from where I have ever been before, I try to phone Jenny over and over, but she doesn't answer, and I don't know this place". I could hear how desperate I sounded, and all I wanted was to be a brave world traveller........ It was my father who answered the phone, and as the wonderful father he was and is, he knew of course what to do. "Listen Britt-Arnhild. I very briefly know a couple in Tromsø. I will phone them, and I am sure they will come and pick you up."
They did and took me arond in the area for a wonderful sightseeing, then back to their home for an even more wonderful meal, and in the end drove me to Jenny's address.
I will always remember the beautiful, tiny, old lady bent double in her postage stamp strawberry field. She had been out all day weeding her strawberry plants and had not heard the phone. She was thrilled to have me there "at last" and invited us all in for a cup of coffee.
From my hotel window in Tromsø this week I had the most perfect view over to the island where Jenny lived 30 years ago, and memories of my first solo travel came back. I spent one week with Jenny. This beautiful, tiny little old lady who lived so close to God and so close to the humans God sent her way. Her red painted wooden house was the tiniest house I had ever lived in, I slept on a small coach placed on a tiny strip of floor outside her tiny bedroom on the first floor. Downstairs she had a dollhouse livingroom, a dollhouse kitchen and a dollhouse bathroom. In the kitchen food was made on the wood stove, in the livingroom the Bible and hymnbook had the best place on a small table, a basket was filled with Jenny's crocheting, my letters through many years were neatly ribboned and placed in the window sill.
I wanted to go back to the island to search for Jenny's house during my stay in Tromsø, but life had other plans. May be for the best anyway. The little red cottage with the beautiful Jenny will forever live in my heart.
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Going home I travelled with the Coastal Line/Hurtigruten from Tromsø to Trondheim. I met a couple of other youths at the boat and spent two days with them. Can you imagine my surprise one night last year when I suddenly got a skype call. "Hello, this is tore. Are you the Britt-Arnhild who travelled with Hurtigruten in May 1977?"
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