The Weirdest of Coincidences

Have I ever told you about the weirdest coincidence of my life?

I spent the summer before my senior year of college living at school instead of coming home. I went to the University of Illinois, which is a huge school, but during the summer so few people stayed that you kind of got to know everyone. My roommate and I made fast friends with a random guy we met out at the bars, who ended up having two seats left on the private plane he was taking to his island in the Bahamas at the end of the summer. Ummm, yes, we obviously accepted.

The island - I think it was a mile long and a quarter mile wide

So the deal was, it wasn't a totally private island, they had sold a good chunk of it to a cruise line. Every other day or so, the cruise ship would drop off thousands of passengers for the afternoon, then pick them back up and leave the island deserted again. If you've ever been on a cruise through the Bahamas and been dropped off at a random little island for a day trip, yep, it was probably there.

"Flying" the tiny plane

So anyway, we flew down to the Bahamas for a week on a mostly deserted island, and spent our time swimming and snorkling, racing around the island in golf carts, accidentally catching a little shark while out fishing and deciding to eat it, getting incredibly sunburnt, lighting giant bonfires, trying to find places to go to the bathroom when the cruise ship bathrooms were locked, you know, the usual. Every time the cruise ship came through though, we would head down to their area to sneak some food and drinks (because we mistakenly left the college-age boys in charge of shopping) and play on their water toys.

The last day though, after a few drinks, we parked our golf cart and stumbled onto the beach as the cruise ship guests were packing up to leave, and I noticed a girl staring at me. And she looked just a little familiar. I would have written it off to the cocktails, except she shouted my name. Yep, it was my cousin. And my aunt, and uncle, and cousins and step-cousins. A big chunk of my family had taken a last minute cruise, and somehow wound up on the same tiny island in the middle of the ocean as me! It was seriously the weirdest thing that had ever happened to me - we only had time to blurt out what we were doing there and take a few shell-shocked pictures and then they had to get back on the boat.  If they had taken their cruise a different week, or had gone back to the boat early, or had grabbed chairs on another section of the beach, I never would have run into them. Instead I would have just grabbed my milk jug of adult Kool-Aid (College Kristina really knew how to keep things classy) and gone merrily on my way.

So tell me, what's the weirdest coincidence you've ever experienced?

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