I'll start it off...
Was in Southern Ca. on a mini vacation last week, stuck in a traffic jam in downtown Hollywood. Car in front of us gets hit by another car, driver hops out. Just happened to be one of our table mates from a cruise we had taken a few years ago. What are the odds??

I hire a car service for airport transportation years ago. The driver tells me he needs to pick up someone important for a ride to the same airport. As it turned out, that someone was a very nice person I met in a bar in Manhattan awhile back. We even ended up together on the same flight to Miami and sat together. Small world.

I travelled from Oz to La for a six week Top Deck tour of USA. One night we stayed at an Indian Reservation which I think was in Nth Dakota. WE went to a bar on the reservation and the guy behind the bar was a school friend of mine !

We were going to drive the Alaska Highway. The starting point is Dawson Creek, British Columbia. We spent the night in a campground next to a nice couple. We went up to Fairbanks and then down to Denali and ended up a little over a week later camping next to them again. We toured around Alaska and then headed back down the Alaska Highway and spend the night again in Dawson Creek. While we didn't get the campsite next to this same couple we did see them there again.

Mind you, we are taking about 4,000 to 5,000 miles and about 4 weeks time and we didn't know the others plans.

Utahtea

Lived in SF Bay Area at the time. Took the family to NYC. Staying in Times Square and one afternoon begin walking to Letterman show on typically crowded streets and literally run into a women and her kids my wife did PTA stuff with. What are the odds....

second one was 2 months ago. I fo to Ireland alot for business. Took my wife this last trip and we did some touristing. Companies factory is in villiage of 7,000 people in Cork. I always stay at a superb B&B there. We walk in after dinner to the small "lobby" area where there is a fireplace and sofas and sitting there with his wife is a guy I worked with 5 years ago. He was on vacation with his kids, and heard this was a good place to stay on his way up north.

Not a US sighting but what the he"..walking through Piazza San Marco in Venice in the midst of an acqua alta. I hear a voice that sounds so familiar and happen upon a woman I used to buy flowers from in SF. She was sitting outside the Florian waiting for the folood waters to recede. She was in Venice for a day as a port o call on a cruise.

This happened when I went to Ao Nang near Krabi last year. One evening when we went out to eat a guy came over to me and asked me if he could ask me a question. I said ?sure? and then he started talking Norwegian and he asked me if I was Norwegian. I confirmed this and then he asked me if my name was Gard. This was really surprising and I said yes once again. It turned out that he had been on my homepage and he had seen pictures and he recognized me from that. That is quite amazing if you ask me. I travel half around the world and then I get recognized because one guy has been on my homepage. Quite amazing.

Regards
Gard
Stavanger, Norway
www.gardkarlsen.com

I was waiting for the KC hotel restaurant to open for breakfast. Someone who had traveled via bus was just arriving and did not like the looks of the hotel. She asked us if we liked it. We were on a budget and not fussy. She inspected her room and declared it too dirty. Traveling by bus had turned out not to be a good idea for her, she was overtired and grumpy. A few years later, she moved to NH and we ran into each other again.

story #2: Arriving at a salmon restaurant in Tok, someone noted our NH license plates. Not only were they also from NH, but he was the big brother of someone I knew.

i went from norway to bangkok. i had been there for 3 days, and next night i went out to get something to eat, and when i was walking back to the hotel a girl pick me on the shoulder and say:long time no see, and it was my neighbour who i had not seen for years. she was just that night in thailand,cause she was leaving the next day for bali. extremly small world!!!!!!!!!!!!

Both of my stories are from a small, obscure island in the Bahamas: Elbow Cay.

On a visit back in 1997, my husband and I would walk down the road from the inn at which we were staying to a beach, and we'd admire a house under construction, on a bluff overlooking the beach and ocean. When I returned to the office, I dove right into work with a new client, who'd engaged my firm while I was away. Over the course of the engagement, I learned the client often frequented an obscure island in the Bahamas and was building a house there. You guessed it: it was the house we looked at every day during our visit.

In 2000, my husband and I chartered a sailboat in the Bahamas. One day, in an anchorage in Elbow Cay, we saw a sailboat of the same make as the one we'd just bought at home, home-ported in our home state, though we never got a chance to visit with the owners. Seeing this boat fueled our own dreams of taking a year or more off and sailing the islands on our identical boat. Once we got home, we began researching the possibility, and in so doing, found the website of a young couple who had done just that. They were the owners of the boat we saw in Elbow Cay! (It gets better...). I decided to e-mail them, and it turned out that they had returned to the U.S. and were now living IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD, and were members of the same sailing club we'd just joined. We decided to meet up with them, and have since become friends with the wife (the husband moved on).

London 1.987. Friends of mine, a couple, went to London for holiday. A friend's daughter was living there and they told their parents that they would call her for having a drink, so the father wrote the phone number in a matches box of the restaurant he owned.
While in a London subway, when opening the matches box to see the phone number in order to call her, a young lady suddenly says . . . hey ! this is from my father's restaurant in Mallorca . . !It was her . . .

About 1991-92, the print shop I am part-owner of printed a political journal called The Next Progressive, edited by a pleasant young man named Eric Liu. After Bill Clinton was elected, Eric wrote speeches for a while for the Clinton State Department. Later, Liu wrote the book Accidental Asian. In 1995, when my wife served the EPA for 4 months assignment in Seattle, I visited her. The night I was to go to the airport, the Seattle electric trolley broke down so we, and about 100 other people were trying to flag a taxi. One of those was Eric Liu. However, Liu and we were in such a panic to get a taxi, I never acknowledged Liu. However, flagging down a taxi so I could make my plane was more important.

Fifteen years ago I decided on a vacation to Aruba I was going to wear shorts for the first time as I was self concious of my weight. At the Stone Bridge I heard someone call my name and there wasn't anyplace to hide...a friend was there on her honeymoon...lol On a visit to her vacation home recently there is a picture of the Stone Bridge....and me on it as a dot..lol....

I had called on a customer and we were discussing our days in the Navy. He was a former Sea-Bee and I a destroyer man. When he told me his father had also served on a destroyer I offered him a recent copy of the Tin Can Sailors newsletter I had in the car to give his dad. When he and his folks were looking through it later on they were surprised to find not only a picture of his father's ship, but a picture of his father and some others standing outside CIC.

In March of 1953 while patroling the east coast of Korea, the destroyer I was on, (USS Trathen DD-530) located and destroyed an enemy supply train. The next day while my father was riding to work on the LIRR, the man next to him who was reading the NY Times commented that one of our destroyers operating in Korea had destroyed an enemy train. "Which one" my father asked, "my son is on one over there." It was the Trathen and I still have the article.

This happens to us all the time on our out-west road trips! DH is a teacher/coach, seems to know everyone, (football is HUGE in the midwest) so we run into acquaintances literally everywhere. Places that come to mind: Yosemite, Redwoods Nat'l Park, Seattle, San Francisco, Scottsdale & Saquarro Nat'l Park and Disney World.

Just two weeks ago at Disneyland, we returned to our motel to find a message from a salesman at the dealership where we lease our vehicles. He and his family flew to Anaheim & were staying in the same place; he couldn't believe we'd drive the 3000 miles there, so he had the dealer check out our plates!

I was in week 3 of a 4 week stay in London recently, and attended a charity sale at a local church (St. Johns). The man in charge was a charming older gentleman who encouraged me to attend the funtion. I ended up buying two book, a hat and other odds and ends. Later that day my husband and I were at the National Gallery and I was approached by a guard and the gallery. It was the same gentleman from the charity sale. He asked me how I enjoyed my purchases and how I enjoyed the museum. It was strange having someone come up to you and talk to you after 3 weeks of being anonymous.

Decades ago, while I was in college in Phila., I was taking a daytrip up to Manhattan to the Met. Museum for a art paper. Despite my best intentions of getting back to Penn Station before rush hour, I ran late and found myself packed into the crosstown shuttle at just about 5:15 pm. As the car started and people were shoved around, the crowd in front of where I was sitting parted and directly across from me was a very dear cousin whom I hadn't seen in 5 years and wasn't even sure what city he now lived in! Astonished, we made our way through the crowd to each other and hurriedly exchanged contact information, but I had to wait until the end of the semester to go back up to NYC to see him.

I kept thinking, what were the odds, given requirement that we be exactly opposite each other on the exact same car of the exact same shuttle on the exact same day at the exact same moment, in a city of millions of commuters on the one day I was in the city.

We were in Montreal on vacation eating at one of those little outdoor cafe's in the old city and I look at the restaurant next to us which also has an outdoor cafe and who is there but someone I went to high school and college with. We are both from New Jersey. Weird!

Everywhere we go, it seems my husband runs into a client. That is not so interesting..but can I tell my son's small world story?
When he got out of college he drove to Seattle with a friend.Met friends new roommates, flew back home after a while.
8 years later-my son lives in Japan, starts work with a new Studio. Goes to a co-workers party, runs into one of those roommates from Seattle, who now lives and works in Japan!

My parents and I emigrated to the States from Austria in 1952. We have a photo album of black and white photos taken of us standing in front of the train just before our trip. Eventually, we ended up in Detroit and made the acquaintance of a nice Austrian family, who had also recently emigrated, and with whom we are still good frieds. My mother was showing them our old photos from 1952 and their family was in the window of the train directly behind where we were getting our photo taken.