Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon - unlikely chain of events

I was invited to spend a fortnight in Maryland by my Afrikaaner 3rd cousin, Terri Lucas, married to an American, in February 2003 (she stated they had had 8 years of mild winters!) After a great 1st week, the worst blizzard in 98 years hit the East Coast on the Sunday, as I was travelling by train from DC to New York to spend 2 nights there. I was able to return to DC by overnight train on the Tuesday morning, but when I got into the station I rang my cousin (who lived in Midtown, a tiny rural hamlet in Maryland) who advised the metro (tube system) wasn't running so she couldn't pick me up and I would have to take the train to Fredericksburg and get a taxi from there. I did so, and came up the steps from the train just as a taxi was pulling into the station car park. I hailed it and, somehow despite my lifelong affliction of being geographically challenged (I was a breech birth and my mum says my sense of direction has remained just as bad ever since), managed to direct him from the back seat the 60 mile trip back up the Interstate to my cousin's house - he was a Bangladeshi immigrant who had been in the US only 6 weeks so had no more real notion of where he was going than I. Upon arrival I directed him how to get back and my cousin came out of the house with exclamations of amazement. After I'd called she realised that Fredericksburg was also a tiny rural hamlet of 6 houses a general store and a train stop used by the local farmers and nobody else - there hadn't been a taxi service in or from the place in 80 years; nobody came to Fredericksburg, nobody went from Fredericksburg, so she had visions of me trapped at a tiny, unmanned, unheated rural train station with no amenities in appalling weather waiting for transport that wouldn't come with the next train 12 hours away. The driver's baffling mangled English during our drive made sense at that moment when I realised that he had been explaining it was entirely coincidental - he'd been hopelessly lost and turned into the station to turn round and retrace his route when I trotted up out of the stairs and hailed his cab in what I thought was a spot of cosmic perfect timing. But the coincidence doesn't end there. The very next year, 2004, I went on a coach holiday trip with some friends including my parents to Scotland - the Scenic Scotland Lochs & Glens tour, happily getting the views from Stirling Castle before it was destroyed. On the last afternoon of the holiday, about 3pm, we called in at a historic village, Callandar, for a coffee and comfort stop. We decided to go into a small cafe down a side street which was very nice; the couple at the next table to ours were clearly American, and my mum exchanged pleasantries, at which point the man said they came from a little place in Virginia called Fredericksburg. "I've been there!" I exclaimed, turning to my parents, "that's where I got the taxi back to Terri's, remember I was telling you." "There's never been a taxi in Fredericksburg!" the couple claimed. I explained what had happened, and they were amazed - they too were on a group holiday tour, and out of all their group, they were the only two had chosen to go into that cafe, as I and my parents and our couple of friends were the only ones out of our group who had picked that cafe. It was also the last day of their holiday, and they had been there an hour when we arrived, and were getting ready to leave "in five minutes" as we sat down at the next table and struck up a conversation. I was lucky enough some years ago to have correspondence with the popular Western author JT Edson, who wrote as a "fiction biographer" and who gave his stories the verisimilitude of real-world biography by often including the phrase, "no writer of fiction would dare include such an outcome for fear of being labelled as too far-fetched, yet such astonishing coincidences happen daily." In my experience, he is absolutely correct.