More found objects and a chance meeting

I don't set a lot of store by stories of having mutual acquaintances with someone chance-met. We all know or at least have met hundreds of people and those sets are going to intersect fairly often. However this one surprised me. I spent five months of 1979 working in Ipswich, Queensland, "away from home" with a coal mine that had problems. I had a great aunt living there and called in on her several times. She was well into her 80s and during one visit she told me about a Royal Australian Air Force man who had been billeted with her and her husband during the Second World War. After the war he had joined the Queensland ambulance service and was living in Rockhampton, a town of about 50,000 at the time with a satellite town, Gracemere, nearby with another 12,000 or so. The story meant little to me and I more or less forgot it. Six months or so later I was in Rockhampton and one Friday agreed to meet a few people at one of the local pubs. When I got there they had not arrived and I struck up a converation with an older man at the bar. Over a few minutes he told me that he had recently retired from the ambulance service, and had been in the air force during the war. Well, bells started to ring as soon as he mentioned the ambulance. Of course it was the same man. Despite the fact I lived in Rockhampton for the next nine years and used that pub pretty frequently, I never saw him again. In October 1999 I had a rush of blood to the head and bought a 1983 Mercedes-Benz coupe which I still have. Their total production of the W126 coupe was 11,267 over ten years and since most of them either stayed in Europe or went to the USA, not too many had right hand drive. If memory serves only about 1,950 of all the versions of the W126 coupe came to Australia in ten years of production. Before buying the car, I had seen one of the later versions with a bigger motor in a used car yard but the price was well out of my range. In the 13 years I have owned it, I have seen no more than about 12 other W126 coupes, probably more like 10. In December 1999, barely two months after the buy, I drove the car several hundred kilometres north to pick up my parents at the railway station at Nambour, a town just north of Brisbane. There was a W126 coupe parked at the station when I got there. The train was very late, so I drove off for a coffee and when I got back the other coupe had gone. Over the next several years I again drove north to Queensland and took the Carnarvon Highway, Roma to Injune (91 km) five times in all. This road does not carry heavy traffic, Injune boasts fewer than 400 people and Roma about 8000. Past Injune is Rolleston with even fewer people, then Springsure with about 840 people, finally Emerald with about 11,000, 402 km north of Roma. With low populations there is not a lot of traffic and most of what there is consists of trucks, utilities (pick-ups) and four wheel drives. On three occasions in the 91 kilometre stretch from Roma to Injune I have seen another W126 couple coming the other way. Of all the lightly trafficed roads in Australia!