Far from home...

Furryanimal

Y gath o Gymru
Location
Wales
​What's the farthest from home you have unexpectedly bumped into a friend/neighbour?
 

You all mentioned some really nice places that I would really like to visit. I would really enjoy going to Cyprus. My grandfather was Greek and I would like to visit there and also the village or town where he grew up as a boy.
 
How about someone that graduated from the same high school I did, but some 10 years before me. Now, how we met...….

At the time, I was working in EMS (wasn't called that back in the mid 70's) for an ambulance company based in Los Angeles, CA. Got a call for a lady going to the hospital, but wasn't an emergency. I was the Attendant and sat in the jump-seat next to her. We started talking and come to find out, she had lived near, and graduated from, the same high school I did in Indiana.

Got her to the hospital and I wished her well.
 
Met a man from our town in Cairns Australia.
Met our friends next door neighbor in Amsterdam.
Met a coworker in Madrid.
 
Gee, my stories are so ordinary compared to y'all! On January 19, 1981, I was in a hospital waiting room in Decatur, GA, while my mother was in surgery. A woman came in and sat down...looked so familiar. Hm. Turned out that she'd been my supervisor years before in El Paso, Texas. She and her husband were on their way to Ronald Reagan's inauguration when he had a heart attack just a few miles from the hospital. They'd been invited to ride their horses in the parade with a group from El Paso. We were surprised to run into one another 1400 miles from "home."

Another time, my DH and I were on our way back to the U.P. after spending Christmas in the Atlanta area with our kids. Went to breakfast in our hotel in Indiana and met our next door neighbors who were on their way to Florida.
 
Probably a thousand miles or so, but nothing particularly surprising.

The "oddest" coincidence I can think of was a time I was scanning some old guest comment books in a hotel lounge in York, England. I want to say the hotel was called something like Judges Lodgings. I ran across comments written a number of years earlier by the parents of a friend in Maine. Small world.
 
I was walking down the street in the town we lived in in Turkey, carrying a tote bag from a department store in my home town. An American GI stopped and asked if I was from there. Yep and yep. Where did I go to high school? Wow, same high school! When did I graduate? Wow, wow, wow, same year. It was a big school and I didn't know him, but he had dated two of my friends and I had dated one of his. Small world.

I also ran into someone I knew in high school when I was in Rome.
 

Back
Top