It's a small world after all...

This past weekend we traveled to Pennsylvania to attend our 10 year college reunion. We took our time getting there, leaving Thursday afternoon and driving to Lexington, VA for the night. Along the way, we stopped for dinner and encountered a wonder of probability –

So if a woman leaves Winston-Salem at 3:30pm traveling to PA at 70 mph, and another woman leaves Knoxville, TN in the afternoon traveling to NY, what are the odds that both women will eat at Cracker Barrel off some random exit in VA and that those women will be related and haven't seen each other in 10 years?

I was facing the entrance of the dining room and I watched as the hostess led a woman, holding a small baby, and a man to their table. The woman looked at lot like my cousin, and my cousin had just had a baby shortly after Carter was born, and the man following them looked just like her husband. It took me a while to process since I wasn’t expecting to see anyone I knew at some random Cracker Barrel off I-81, but I decided that yes, that was definitely my cousin. So I told Casey, “that was my cousin who just walked by…” and I got up and went to her table to say hello. They joined us for dinner and it was fun to catch up on life in person (she blogs regularly at Raising Olives and we’re facebook friends, so we had a vague idea of what’s been going on in each other’s lives, but face-to-face is always much better.)

So what are the odds? Casey wasn’t hugely surprised since I have over 50 first cousins, so I’m bound to run into them sometime, right? It reminds me of when my brother was walking down the street in Nairobi, Kenya and saw someone wearing a shirt with my alma mater on it. So he stopped her and asked her if she knew me. Turns out she was one of my hall-mates in college and lived right across the hall from me. Also in college, one night my roommate and I were talking about our parents growing up and it turned out that our moms went to the same church in New Jersey when they were teenagers and her mom often spoke of my aunt and uncle who were her age, but we had never known of the connection before.

So maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe a Divine appointment. Either way , it was fun!