TL;DR
This is a somewhat long tale and it happened a long time ago (winter of 1956-57; either Dec. or Jan., I don’t recall).
I had met my first serious girlfriend, Elaine. She was from Scranton and had come to Philly (with another girl) to experience the “big city”. Eventually, she moved to NY and that’s when we broke up.
But anyway, we were really serious and she wanted me to meet her parents. Neither of us had a car, so one Friday evening we went to the bus station to take a bus to Scranton. Not Greyhound, but a small regional company called Martz. But the bus to Scranton was full. Bummer.
But Elaine said, let’s just take the bus to Wilkes Barre. I have relatives there and something will work out. In the meantime, Elaine had arranged for her father to pick us up at the bus station. So she asked the bus driver to look out for a man looking for someone and explain that we had taken the Wilkes-Barre bus. Which he agreed to do. So we got on the Wilkes-Barre bus with our small suitcases. About halfway there, the bus stopped at Stroudsburg where several skiers got off. Ten minutes later our bus driver asked for the people who wanted to go to Scranton to come to the front and he explained that now the Scranton bus driver had radioed him that his bus now had empty seats and that if our bus driver would leave us off in the highway, he would pick us up in about five minutes.
So we got off the bus and stood with out suitcases in the 20 degree weather along the snow-covered verge for five minutes and happily got on to the bus and got to Scranton where Elaine’s father met us and took us to their house. We spent a happy weekend there.
But that is not the end of the tale. Far from it. On Sunday, we decided to visit Elaine’s relatives in Wilkes-Barre. And we would take the bus from there Sunday evening back to Philly. After all, our return tickets were actually labeled Wilkes-Barre anyway. Although the fares from Philly to either Scranton or Wilkes-Barre were the same and they would accept either ones. So after the visit, Elaine’s father drove us over to the bus station. As we got on the bus, we recognized that the driver had been the driver of the Scranton bus on Friday. And he recognized us. “I thought you were in Scranton.” We explained about visiting relatives. Then he absolutely floored us with his next statement. “You know, about a half hour after you got let off the Wilkes-Barre bus, it broke down and the passengers were stranded until Saturday morning.”
A very lucky weekend indeed.