Great story! Our lives followed a similar trajectory.

After I graduated from university, my best friend and I decided to work for a year to raise enough money to travel. We are both from tiny rural communities in southern Alberta. We ended up in Australia because, by the time we had enough money, it was January and decided Europe would be too cold. We travelled via cruise ship because flights were so expensive, it was only 200$ more to spend three weeks on a luxury ship. The ship was filled with elderly people and only 25 passengers under the age of 30. We made some amazing friendships before we arrived in Sydney. Feeling homesick for our friends on the ship, we printed out a roll of pictures to help us remember them. Once in Sydney, our first destination was the Sydney Opera House. My friend turned to me and said, “Hey, that guy over there looks just like my friend Randy, from Tabor. (The town of Tabor has 1000 people) I said, sarcastically I might add. “Oh, I’m sure it is why don’t you go say hi?” She did, and it was.

Then, when we are in a hostel in Queensland and sharing the pictures of our cruise with some people we’d met. One says, “Hey, that’s Kathleen.” Turns out Kathleen was her neighbour back in Calgary.

Then, we are in Adelaide and meet someone who, when we told them that we are from Canada, says, “Hey, I know someone from Canada. Maybe you know them?” After we stopped rolling our eyes and tried to explain to them how big Canada was, and how the odds of us knowing them were impossibly small, he adds, “His name is Freddie Bonn. He’s from someplace called Abbottsford.”

Freddie was one of the 25 young people on our cruise!

Then, we get back home, me to the town of Brooks, population 5000. I worked at the local hospital there. I was showing my pictures to my friend Leona, a recreational therapist at the same hospital. She picks out a picture and says, “Hey, this is Kathleen.” I look at her in stunned surprise and she adds, “She was my neighbour in Calgary.”

And yes, she knew the girl from Queensland, too. They’d all grown up together.

There are NO degrees of separation. lol