lisashontheroad:

When I was 13 years old, my parents, sister and I were wandering around the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain, when I spotted my summer camp counselor from the States.

“Mom. I see someone I know over there.”

“No you don’t,” she responded, without looking away from a painting that had caught her eye. “We’re in Spain, for goodness’ sake.”

“No, really. I do. Look. MOM.”

Exasperated, she finally looked in the direction where I was pointing, only to see the young woman’s face light up in recognition. “Lisa! Is that you?” my favorite camp counselor from the previous summer shouted, rushing toward us and enveloping me in a hug as my mother’s jaw dropped.

I don’t know why she didn’t believe me, as it wasn’t the first time I ran into someone I knew while we were traveling. It’s not that I know THAT many people in the world. I just travel a lot and so it stands to reason that many of the people I choose to spend time with are also travelers and eventually, our paths would cross. I’ve run into acquaintances in New Zealand, friends of friends in Nepal, college buddies in Ecuador and even Peace Corps volunteers traveling through Zanzibar who had a crush on an old friend of mine who was serving with them in Cameroon, which we discovered over beers one night.

This morning, I was walking through our resort outside of Cabo San Lucas when I heard “Lisa!” from below me. There, waving, was a colleague from Seattle, neither of us aware that the other was in Mexico this week. Of course.

-loving this small planet in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico