Chance Meeting in New York

My old school classmates and I all turned 50 during 2010/11. My birthday is in January, and my husband and I decided, as part of the birthday celebrations, to holiday later in the year (September/October) - staying in New York for 4 nights, followed by a tour of New England. On our 2nd day in New York we spotted that the Queen Mary was docked, and commented that the last time we'd seen her was when she sailed up the River Mersey, past our house, a few weeks earlier. On our last day in New York we decided to use the final one of our 4 day bus tickets, so left our hotel and walked across town to Times Square to get the tourist bus to to do the "Central Park Loop". There are at least two companies who have buses leaving Times Square every 20 minutes or so throughout the day. You can imagine our shock when we climbed to the top deck of the bus and and found an old schoolfriend of mine and her husband, who were celebrating her 50th birthday having travelled over on the Queen Mary and were spending 3 nights in New York (her birthday had been previous September but her husband had left it too late to book a trip for that autumn!). We now live in different parts of the country (Liverpool and Aberystwyth) and are in regular contact (ok - only once or twice a year!) but neither of us knew the other was going to be there. Talk about making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up! We were completely gobsmacked and I think the rest of the bus passengers wondered what on earth had happened to cause such a commotion. Needless to say, it was a wonderful surprise and we spent the morning sightseeing together and had a trip to the theatre in the evening. A day to remember!