This journey of a lifetime has had many twists and turns and connected me and Scott to other travelers, artists, musicians, and free spirits. We learned that a teacher named Lisa Sterling in Greensboro, NC was teaching an art class to the next generation of artists based on Scott’s art after Lisa had been introduced to this blog by a mutual friend. This week we received an interesting email from a young couple in Chapel Hill, NC. They are coming to India on a Phillips Grant to study. Michelle and Chris (shown above) have been following our blog, are inspired by it, and want to meet Scott. They are even willing to tailor their itinerary to pass through Goa in time to do so. The clock ticks on… and we are scaling back to our Inner Circle in order to conserve Scott’s waning energy, but when we learned that Chris’s sister is a student of Lisa Sterling’s we knew we had no choice but to say yes to this pair. Hopefully they will be coming through Panjim within the next two weeks.

Michelle writes, “I am graduating from UNC in August and Chris is graduating in December, and we are both coming to India on the Phillips travel grant, which allows UNC students funding to take on self-directed research projects abroad. My project is geared towards women and access to healthcare services since I hope to go into Public Health, and his is directed towards studying Indian musical traditions and production. We are both 22 years old and I would say ‘true free spirits’ describes us perfectly, we chose India because it will be a challenge (as opposed to our peers who opted fro France and England, etc) and hopefully we will grow from it and learn about ourselves through the process, and because I have been before and want to share it with him. Our trip is from June 21st to August 12th, when Chris will leave and go back to school and I will stay in Delhi doing an internship until early October.I am a Hindi-Urdu student so my first trip was for 2.5 months in an intensive summer language immersion in Jaipur, Rajasthan in 2011.”