Running into your hometown while away on vacation
 

Hi all. When typing up our experiences going to a remote corner of the Grand Canyon (it's under the Peach Springs thread if anyone's at all interested), I was reminded of an amusing (to us, anyway) incident that happened to us in this isolated section of the country. We stayed in Peach Springs, AZ, in a motel run by the Hualapai Indians that provided the only food and place to stay for miles around. (It was very nice, BTW). We are from outside Philadelphia, and when we were checking in, I noticed a young Hualapai boy wearing an Iverson jersey. We are big NBA/76ers fans, and were surprised to see Iverson's jersey so far from home. (After all, we were in Kobe and Shaq country :) ) I told the boy that we were from Phila. and that we had been to the Sixers playoff game a few weeks prior. He looked at me like I was the luckiest person in the world and informed me that Iverson was his "hero". The next day we drove 60 miles and hiked 8 miles into the Havasupai Indian reservation. There we passed a teenage Havasupai boy leading a mule/horse train also wearing an Iverson jersey. We pointed to his jersey and my husband said "Go Sixers". The boy told us that "Iverson is the man". Love him or hate him, Iverson's popularity is sure far-reaching.

Last year when we were in Smugglers Notch, VT we ran into friends we hadn't seen for about 8 years. Our oldest kids, 9 at the time, were each others' first friend. They moved to northern Jersey and we became "Christmas card friends". It made a pleasant stay even better to run into old friends.

Has anyone else ran into something surprising from their hometown when far from home?

Great story,but that kid should have his head examined for having Iverson as his hero. I understand you are huge Sixer fans,but unfortunately the dats of Larry,Magic and Dr. J are long gone.

My story is years old but when we were preparing to get married we were required to attend premarital counseling and chose to attend a weekend event rather than try to work it in over a period of weeks. Anyway since we couldn't room with each other we were assigned the spouse-to-be of another couple. So I'm rooming with the bride-to-be and husband is rooming with her fiance. They were very nice people but we were not living in the same town and made no promises to keep in touch after the weekend. We wished them well on their wedding which was scheduled to take place a week before ours.

All went well with the wedding and off we went to Waikiki for our honeymoon. I was pooped so I took a nap while new husband went to take photos. Who does he run into but the couple from our classes. It was their last night and our first night so we had a drink together and talked about our weddings. It was soooo weird.

I know, doc, I know! I always tell my son to admire Iverson as an athlete, not as to how he lives his life. But he sure is fun to watch play basketball! What he as a 5'11"ish player can accomplish against guys so much bigger/taller than him is amazing. My husband and I joke that it seems whenever we're on our summer vacation, an NBA athlete gets arrested. This year we were in Colorado when Kobe was arrested; last year we were away when Iverson was charged. Sigh.

I was in NYC a couple of years ago and was walking down the street and saw someone I thought was a client of my husbands. I'm hating this because now I have to go make small talk and can't remember her name. As I'm walking up to her I realize that it is Leona Helmsley! Yikes! Glad I didn't speak!

I've run into people I know in the middle of EPCOT and on a very crowded beach on Nauset Beach in Cape Cod. My father ran into an old friend in the middle of Rome. I guess it happens more frequently then you'd expect.

I passed a former big boss when in NYC, he was holding hand with someone else I knew...

that was weird.

During the 1970's a television show called 'Moving On' happened to be filming an episode in Hendersonville, NC where my mother lived with my brother who was then just a little boy. A stuntman working for the show was quite taken by my mom and invited her out to LA for a visit. She went and while touring, in addition to people constantly making small talk with her just to hear her accent, she ran into a lady who lived just up the road in the town of Fletcher.

I've always thought that was kind of neat.

When I was home visiting my parents in Iowa, I was having coffee with old friends in a book store. I looked up at the counter and see the guy whose office is next to mine at work in Kansas City. Apparently they stop in my hometown every year to go to this book store on their way home from their cabin in Michigan. Odd!

The weirdest thing that ever happened to us in this regard was when we were on the island of Moorea. We were staying at Club Med, and went on a picnic to a little motu. We didn't enjoy it, and wanted to leave before the Club Med boat was coming to get us. So we walked to the other end of the motu, and flagged down a fisherman in a little boat, and asked him to return us to Moorea. There were two other guys there who had the same idea. While in the boat, I took a picture of the motu. When we got home (to a small town in the Bay Area of California), I had the photos developed. I was downtown in a small shop, showing the photos to a friend when the owner of the adjoining shop stopped to see the photos we were sharing. We got to the one I took of the motu, and she said, "That is my boyfriend"! He was in the foreground of the photo I took in the boat, because he was one of the guys who also got a ride from the fisherman! He had also been vacationing on Moorea! None of us could believe the coincidence!

Maybe I'm just coincident-prone, but I have TONS of these stories: sitting next to a girl I hadn't seen since high school on a plane coming home from Los Cabos; running into children's 8th grade teacher at Charles DeGaulle airport; seeing another 2nd grade parent at a big resort in the Ozarks. If my memory were better I could go on and on! The world is just one big village...

My husband says I ALWAYS run into people I know when travelling...think it's because I love people watching.

Here are two travel stories. Ran in to the parents of a high school friend while ferrying from one side of Lake Como, Italy to the other. Ran into two college friends and their family while at Old Faithful Lodge. They were doing the same loop so we arrange to have dinner together at Lake Yellowstone.

Here's one like the wedding story. My husband and I attended a LaMaze birthing class 10 years ago before our first child was born. We lived in Boston; the class was in Cambridge and we've now moved to a suburb. Last year, I finally figured out why this other mom at my kids' elementary school looked so familiar. She was in the birthing class and our children (who go to school together) were born on the same day in the same hospital. Go figure.

I grew up in the Monterey Bay area and our strawberries and artichokes find there way all over the place. My husband found strawberries from home in Germany and they were REALLY expensive - LOL.

Not from our hometown--but some years ago we were at a Broadway show while on a business trip from Nebraska. A friend from West Virginia was sitting in front of us--neither of us knew the other would be in New York at that time.

Just happened last month outside Madame Toussauds in Las Vegas. We bumped into a couple that my husband had grown up with in very small town in NJ.

YES! This has happened to me. I went with two girlfriends to Paris two years ago. We were walking down a touristy area street when I heard a familiar voice. A voice I remembered from High School. I saw him, and immediately called his name. He looked at me, and we both smiled. What a small world! He is a Harvard Grad that teaches in Paris and commutes between Haiti and Boston. He was featured in Reader's Digest because of his altrusic ways with health care. It's nice to know that there are still people out there that care!

While at Disney world years ago my family and I bumped into our next door neighbors. We had told each other we were going on vacation but neither of us had stated where we were going.

I had something funny like this happen, but it wasn't with a human :) We were on vacation in San Francisco, and had gone that afternoon into San Jose. On our way back, we took a side road to get to Highway 1, and ended up completely lost...first in a foresty area, and then in some rolling hills. We stopped at this quaint looking store near a pumpkin patch, and went in to get some sodas and a snack. They had some touristy type stuff also: local knick-knacks, tshirts, etc. I was flipping through the postcards and came across one that said "Ralph the Swimming Pig, in Aquarena Springs". I just fell over laughing, this was right next to where we lived in Texas, just one of those little tourist trap type places...and they had a bunch of postcards for it in CALIFORNIA?! We asked the lady behind the counter why they had them and why they were selling them, and she said the owner had taken a trip to Austin, had visited it and thought it was kitschy...so he brought a bunch of postcards back.