I ran into my cousin at a Cafe de Monde in New Orleans around 2am, during Mardi Gras. Hadn’t seen her in years.
I ran into a co-worker on a cruise ship. It was the week of Thanksgiving, so it wasn’t unusual for a bunch of us to take
vacation time. Just unusual that we ended up at the same place.
I ran into someone I babysat in Minnesota right here in New Jersey. She was married and pregnant with her second child!
It wasn’t remote, but was interesting to me. I grew up and graduated high school in Anchorage, then left for some 30 years before returning in 1998. One of my friends from back when I was growing up was a guy named Bob. Even though the graduating class was large, I hadn’t seen any of my former classmates around town, but then the town had grown considerably. One night in about 2005 we ordered pizza from a new place. When I opened the door, there was Bob, all 6’7" of him holding my pizza. A little awkward, as by then I was making somewhere north of $100K/yr. Then he tells me that he retired as a bagger from Safeway. It was just. . .odd.
There’s a woman at work I’ve been friends with for eight years. We’re both fitness enthusiasts, and we are always sharing tips & ideas on how to improve our running and lifting regimens. We talk/email about once a week.
We live near Dayton, OH. In January our 16 year old daughter and I drove up to Cleveland to visit the R&R HoF. We drove up on Friday, got a hotel, and went to the museum on Saturday.
We decided to go to a restaurant after arriving at the hotel on Friday evening. We walked to the Hard Rock Café, ate, and then walked to the House of Blues to watch whatever band was playing in the (free) restaurant area. It was January, and quite cold, and there were very few people at the bars on E 4th St.
At around 10 PM we left the House of Blues to go back to the hotel. As soon as we left the place and walked out onto E 4th St, I saw a woman walk in front of me. I stared at her and thought, “Don’t I know her?” She looked back and stared at me. I couldn’t believe it… it was the woman mentioned in the first paragraph. She was with her husband and two children on a short vacation in Cleveland, and I had absolutely no idea she would be there. It was just so surreal and spooky; neither of us could believe it.
There must be something magic about the Hard Rock Cafe.
I lived in Nagoya, Japan for a couple years in my 20s. During a business trip to Tokyo (a few hours away from where I lived) visited the Hard Rock Cafe in Roppongi. While waiting for a table, I heard someone calling my name. I turned around to find a guy I had gone to college with. He was a couple years ahead of me in school and I wasn’t exactly friends with him, but it was a small school where you pretty much knew everyone. Though, to be honest, I only knew him by his nickname. I didn’t even know his real name, which I learned for the first time that night. We had dinner together and parted. In the 25 years since, I’ve never seen him again.
I’d been out of college about 3 years, and went on a trip to Scotland with an ex-girlfriend who I was still friendly with, and in the hotel in Edinburgh, I ran into a guy I knew fairly well from college.