Asklemmy

I was on a National Express coach from Newcastle to Edinburgh, years ago, and a couple stops in this guy stows a mountain bike in the luggage compartment, gets on the bus and it's pretty full so he ends up sitting next to me.

We chatted for the whole trip, he was telling me about how he'd just spent the last couple of days biking across the country, it was just a really nice pleasant encounter with no awkwardness or anything, which as you can imagine since I'm on Lemmy is not a normal occurrence for me.

At one point I started to feel travel sick, which I think freaked him out a bit at first, but I'd come prepared with some minty sweets to keep it at bay which I of course shared with my new friend.

He got off the coach before we reached Edinburgh, and I remember sitting there watching him retrieve his bike and wave up at me to say goodbye, and I realised...we never even introduced ourselves. Like, not even first names. And I don't know if it was the mild delirium of the travel sickness but I was just hit with this wave of existential realisation that I'd never see this person again ever in my life.

It wasn't a romantic thing or anything, he was just canny and it's weird we didn't exchange any info!

I think about National Express Bike Bloke on a fairly regular basis. Hope he's had a happy life.

I was about 13 at the time and on a family vacation. My parents were in a store shopping and I was bored so I went to stand outside. I'm standing out there and this very old, very fat, very short man (he looked a lot like Danny devito) walks up to me and says "Aren't you just the cutest." He then pinches my cheek and walks away. I'll never forget him.

I was 18 and riding on a train in Salt Lake City in 1999 or 2000. There was this girl with her friends on the other end of the car and she was knitting. We made eye contact and she smiled. My friend urged me to go talk to her but I was too intimidated.

One of those “what if” moments…

I went on a summer camping trip that involved driving through miles of desert in middle of no where USA. There was no water, fuel, or anything for at least 500 miles in any direction. Especially no traffic. Our van came upon a car stranded on the side of the road, two twenty something guys desperately trying to flag us down. We were kinda wary because they were acting off, and we were all women But no way could we leave them, that would be a death sentence. So we told them to climb up in the cargo bay, gave them water and told them we’d drop them off at the next town. A couple hours later they sobered up and explained they had gotten lost coming back from a summer road trip, driven until they had run out of gas. Four hours later of 100 plus degree temperatures and no other cars they had gotten overheated from the sun and had made the monumentally dumb decision to drink the tequila they had brought as a souvenir because it was the only liquid in the car. We took them into town, replenished our water and went on our way. I think about how easily they could have never run into anybody out there before it was too late.