After Losing Their Spouses, 2 Travelers Took Their Retirement Trips Anyway — and Met Someone Who Would Change Their Life

NEED TO KNOW

• Andy Boye and Lori Kruczek met on a guided group tour of France after losing their longtime spouses

• A shared moment exploring Mont-Saint-Michel sparked a connection, leading to deeper conversations and a budding romance

• They married in 2026 and continue to find joy in exploring the world together

When Andy Boye and Lori Kruczek embarked on a guided group tour of France, neither was searching for romance. Instead, they were widowed retirees honoring the wishes of their late partners by making use of their accumulated vacation points to see the world. But as it turned out, a chance detour in Versailles brought them one step closer to their future spouses. 

Both Boye, 72, and Kruczek, 74, intended to travel abroad with their respective partners after retirement. But after Kruczek’s husband died in 2013 and Boye’s wife died from breast cancer in 2022, the widowed retirees had to find a new plan.

The strangers were both longtime Marriott Vacation Club members and happened upon the same company, Collette Tours, offering travel packages across all seven continents that they could book with the points they’d accumulated over the years.

In April 2024, Boye, who is from Albuquerque, N.M., and Kruczek, who calls Austin home, simultaneously set off on a 12-day group tour entitled “France Magnifique,” that promised to showcase the best of what the country has to offer. Boye traveled solo while Kruczek arrived with a friend.

“It was kind of the usual way these tours stars,” Boye tells PEOPLE of the trip, which had about 40 participants. “Everybody gets in a room and the tour director tells you what’s in store… I noticed a very attractive woman in the room that seemed to be sitting next to another woman, but, you know, it was more back of the mind kind of curiosity.” 

Boye tells PEOPLE he’d been married for over 40 years before losing his wife and wasn’t looking for anything romantic. But as love stories go, “you usually get hit by it when you’re least expecting it,” he says. 

Kruczek better remembers later that evening when the group had plans for a dinner in the Village of Versailles, but a cluster of fire trucks was parked outside the restaurant. The group quickly made alternative arrangements at a nearby establishment where Kruczek and her friend sat next to two men.

“We started up a conversation with them, but then out of the corner of my eye, kind of kitty-corner from me, there was another handsome gentleman sitting there,” Kruczek remembers. “I thought, ‘Oh, you know, he looks interesting.’ We just exchanged names… but I think we both had kind of a little spark, a little something.” 

As the tour went on, the travelers would often find themselves sitting next to each other at dinner. But a real connection was formed at Mont-Saint-Michel, the unique fortified island off the coast of Normandy that features a towering abbey at the top of a hill.

Boye says there was limited time to visit the abbey following complications in buying the tickets. He remembers seeing Kruczek “visibly agitated” at the foot of the building. Although he didn’t know at the time, Kruczek had wanted to see this landmark her entire life.

“Eventually she says, ‘We’re not gonna get to spend any time here. I have to go see this.’ We were waiting around for tablets that’ll guide us around.” Fed up, Kruczek turned to Boye and said, “‘I don’t need a tablet.  I’m just gonna go. Do you wanna go with me?'” he recalls. Boye agreed.

“We ended up touring this beautiful, romantic place, getting lost because we didn’t have our tablets… We explored the place all by ourselves, and it was great,” Boye says. “So from there, the rest of the time on the tour, we kind of made it a point to get together on the excursions.” 

The tour ended with another romantic dinner, this time at the Eiffel Tower. The travelers once again sat next to each other, got to talking, and “just seemed to have so much in common,” Kruczek recalls. “There was so much about our backgrounds that was similar.” 

“It happened to be on the two year anniversary of my wife’s passing,” Boye says. “I happened to mention it, and then we kind of shared our stories about our spouses passing. When you lose a spouse after that amount of time, it’s hard for people to understand. And so having someone that has shared that same experience in life was significant.” 

Before parting ways, the travelers exchanged phone numbers to keep in touch. Boye used the “good excuse” that he probably had some photos she’d be interested in. 

“We eventually got to the point where we were texting songs in the morning to each other,” Boye notes. “They got more and more romantic, as you can imagine.” 

After a trip visiting Kruczek in Austin, the two got to planning another international trip with the same tour company, this time to Italy’s Amalfi Coast. By the time the tour came around in September 2025, they had already decided to get married. So they decided to make the engagement official in the most romantic place imaginable: Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, a breathtaking cliffside estate. 

In April 2026, the couple got married and celebrated with a honeymoon tour in Barcelona the following month. The couple says traveling together works because they share a “constant anticipation of enjoying things together.” 

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“We both were married for a long time. We had the good times and the bad times, the rough spots and we know where you can trip yourself up,” Boye says. “We both consciously make an effort to avoid that. We want this to be, you know, kind of our happy time in life. The happy time that we would have shared with our other spouses, but we’re not able to do that. So, we found each other.”

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