Growing up in a very small town in the Alentejo region of Portugal during the 1970s, Leonor Drago recalls watching planes fly over her home, convinced she’d never get to ride on one.
She dreamed of visiting destinations like the United States or even France, but the prospect of venturing much further than the area she lived in seemed inconceivable at the time.
“For me, the United States was something unreachable,” says Leonor, before explaining that her family couldn’t really afford to travel internationally back then.
“It was not easy to get there.”
Life-changing letter
But her perspective on the world outside the town of Moura changed back in 1975, when she was handed a letter from a 12-year-old girl named Michelle Anderson, who lived in the US.
The two youngsters soon became pen pals, regularly sharing stories about their lives by letter.
Their bond has spanned decades, marriages, children and various different forms of communication. And yet they still light up whenever they hear from each other.
“It’s been a really good bond,” Michelle told CNN Travel during a Zoom call with her friend virtually alongside her. “It’s been fun. I couldn’t imagine her not being a part of my life, and her family too.”
Reflecting on how they were brought together all those years ago, Michelle explains that she was “interested in learning about another country” and her mother had suggested that she try to find a penpal.
“Her idea was to have me write letters introducing myself as a 12-year-old girl from a little town called Washington Depot, Connecticut, which had and probably still has about 3,000 people in it, and say that I would like to correspond to a girl approximately my age,” she says. “And I spun the globe and found three spots.”
One of those spots was a Portuguese town close to Moura.
According to Leonor, Michelle’s letter was first handed to another young girl who wasn’t interested in it. Luckily, she attended the same school as Leonor, who soon took possession.
“I said, ‘Show it to me,” Leonor recalls. “She said, ‘I don’t want it.’ And I said, ‘You don’t? I do.’ That was the beginning.”
Leonor responded to Michelle’s letter, and the youngsters found that they had a lot in common.
“She liked the same kind of poetry that I like,” says Leonor. “She liked sweet things, cute things.”
Michelle fondly recalls those first letters today, describing how Leonor asked her to correct her English.
“I wish we had them still, because that would be very fun…” she says. “It was honestly just pop culture.
“I mean, we were 12-year-old and 15-year-old girls, so I remember it just being what movies we had seen and maybe what book I was reading, or what show was popular on television.
“And sometimes we would find similarities in the shows or in the books especially.’”
Despite living on different continents, they were completely fascinated with each other’s lives.
“We had never vacationed,” says Michelle. “So when she would talk about going to the Algarve on vacation, I’m like, ‘Wow, she gets to go away on vacation. How lucky is she?’”
Snail mail
Michelle points out that “mailing a package was expensive, and there were no cell phones” back then, so they would send each other mementos of their lives, or whatever they were into.
“We would send pictures or stickers,” she says. “In the United States, these wacky stickers were a huge thing, and I remember sending things like that.”
And while the idea of traveling to the US had previously seemed beyond the realms of possibility for Leonor, having such a close friendship with someone who lived there meant that it felt far less “unreachable” now.
“Through Michelle, I knew a lot about the culture,” she says. “I think that her friendship opened doors to me.”
After writing letters back and forth consistently for a few years, the girls were keen to meet in person, and hatched a plan for Michelle to travel to Portugal for a visit.
However, this was by no means an easy feat, and Michelle recalls taking on countless babysitting jobs to save up for the airfare.
“It took me three years to earn that money, babysitting at 50 cents an hour,” she says.
According to Michelle, the parents in her neighborhood raised her pay from 50 cents to $1 an hour when they realized what she was saving up for.
“It kind of became like a neighborhood thing,” she adds.
Once she had enough money for the trip, Michelle bought her ticket.
And on August 7, 1980, her parents dropped her off at New York’s JFK International Airport for what would turn out to be one of the most memorable trips of her life.
“I also had never flown before,” she explains. “And I was 17, so I was between my junior and senior year of high school… I’m not sure how it all came to fruition.
“But next thing I knew, I was on a plane and spending like three weeks with you.”
First meeting
As they’d never seen each other in real life, both Michelle and Leonor made sure that they arrived at the airport with something to help them recognize each other.
“I went with a picture of her in my hand, and Leonor had a picture of me, and that’s how we found each other at the airport,” she says, adding that she’d also brought along a Smurfs soft toy, as they “were all the rage at the time” and Billy Joel’s ‘Glass Houses’ album as gifts.
“So we just walked around until we found each other, and that was it. Her brother actually found me.
“I can vaguely remember him tapping me on the shoulder and holding the picture up. I’m like, ‘We found each other, now what?’”
Over the next two weeks, Michelle became completely immersed into Leonor’s life in Portugal, going camping with her family in the Algarve, and even taking a boat trip to Spain, before getting to know the town of Moura.
“I basically just lived with you and did whatever you were doing,” she says, addressing Leonor.
“We did some things that maybe would have been a little bit special, but for the most part, I was just incorporated right into the family life. So I got to see what your day to day was like.”
When asked of her first impressions of Portugal, Michelle recalls being struck by the “olive trees everywhere” as well as being horrified when she was brought a plate of fresh tuna when they went out to eat.
“I didn’t know what to get. And then I recognized the word ‘tuna,’” she says, explaining that she’d only ever had “tuna in the can” previously. “So I thought that would be fine.”
“Imagine my surprise when that tuna came with a full head and an eye looking at me. I was like, ‘Oh, wow… I’m so far out of my element.’”
As for Leonor, she was thrilled to have her friend from the United States in town, and Michelle’s visit soon became the talk of the neighborhood.
“I was famous,” she says, before detailing how surprised she was when Michelle went to run a bath right after eating dinner.
“In Portugal, it’s thought that it’s not good to have a bath after the meal,” she explains. “We have to wait two hours till we can have a bath… Well, now I have a bath after dinner too.”
After spending an unforgettable few weeks together, the two friends bid each other farewell at the airport, and Michelle headed back to the US.
While it would be decades before they would meet in person again, Leonor and Michelle never stopped communicating.
As they got older, went to college, built careers, got married and had children, their monthly letters continued.
“When the children were born, we didn’t stop,” says Leonor. “But it was harder, because there was still no email.”
Unbreakable bond
Leonor and Michelle kept each other up to speed on all of the special events in their lives, moving from letters to email as technology advanced.
“Once we figured out we could email each other, it made them a little more frequent again,” says Michelle.
Although they were eager to see each other in the flesh once again, various circumstances prevented them from doing so for a while.
“Our salaries are not very high here in Portugal,” explains Leonor, who is a teacher. “I would have loved to take the children to New York, of course. I only managed to take them to Paris and London.”
Leonor explains that she and her husband allocated much of their finances to their children’s university education, and it was a long time before they could afford to travel to the US.
However, she was at least now confident that it would happen one day — and it did.
In 2022, Leonor flew to the US with her husband Filipe, and went on to visit Michelle and her family in Rhode Island.
“It had been one of my dreams,” Leonor says of the special trip, before explaining that they’d been scheduled to visit in 2020, but the trip was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Her excitement at finally being on US soil was only matched by the joy of being reunited with her dear friend.
“It was literally 42 years, almost to the day,” says Michelle. “I mean, by that time, we could video call and email. So it was a little easier to find her at Newark Airport.”
Leonor arrived armed with a long list of sights that she wanted to see, and she and Michelle spent five days “running through the city.”
When Michelle’s husband Rich expressed concern that the two friends might find that they weren’t compatible as travel companions, she says she dismissed the idea completely.
“I kind of said to him, ‘I’m not too worried about it,’” Michelle explains. “Because I think when you have two people that have maintained the relationship that we’ve maintained for so long, you kind of get the sense that you’re cut from the same cloth.
“It’s a rare person that wants to do that. So I felt really comfortable.”
While they visited the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Leonor says she was most excited about going to M&J Trimming, a New York needlecraft store with countless ribbons and buttons.
“I like doing those kind of things,” she says. “I had to buy something, and I bought three buttons. I will never forget that store. Never. No one goes to New York and goes to a store like that. They go to Macy’s probably.”
And after fantasizing about what it would be like to live in the US back when she was a youngster, Leonor was finally able to get a real taste of this, courtesy of her dear friend.
“In spite of loving New York a lot, and I would like to go back again, the five days I spent in Michelle’s house, for me, were the most enjoyable of all,” she says.
“To be able to live in an American house. To do what the Americans do. To go to those giant supermarkets. So many ice cream flavors. So many Oreos… Everything is so big there.”
Lifelong connection
Now in their 60s, Leonor and Michelle have stayed as close as ever since that visit two years ago.
They no longer write letters, but the pair constantly check in with each other via WhatsApp messages or emails, sending images of what they happen to be doing, and even what they’re having for dinner that night.
“It’s amazing to me that in a world that is as big as the one we live in, is how we’ve just managed to make it small with this really unique friendship,” says Michelle, who teaches group exercise classes.
“I just feel like we are very compatible… We just hit it off. We had more in common, which is true of everybody, right?
“We have a lot more in common with people than we’d like to think. And we just happen to hit the nail on the head.
“And I wish we lived closer, because I could see us going for a walk around the block and having coffee a couple times a week.”
Leonor believes that their longstanding friendship is testament to the notion that “we should be more open to the outside world,” noting that she finds that some young people seem to live in “a very small world” and “don’t want to leave that shell.”
“Other cultures enrich us,” she adds.
Leonor and Michelle each have two children, and they were thrilled when their daughters met up in Barcelona, where Leonor’s daughter lives.
