A chance encounter.

Wenn jemand eine Reise tut, so kann er was erzaehlen

Traveling consists of 99% waiting, sitting, lining up and being searched. The remaining 1% is meeting interesting people and partaking in interesting events. A recent trip to New Brunswick, New Jersey took me first to the Newark International airport. From there to New Brunswick one can take a taxi for $75 or a train for $8.75. I chose the latter. To get to the train station one takes a monorail from the airport that deposits one to the interior of a station that looks like a large version of a typical C-train station in Calgary. I had to wait for about an hour in the station for the next train to New Brunswick. There were only a few people waiting with me. One of them was a man, possibly in his fifties and I struck up a conversation with him. He seemed like a decent fellow. As we talked he mentioned that he was a retired army officer. I then mentioned that the uncle of the wife of one of my colleagues was general Petraeus, the current Commander U.S. Central Command. The man then commented that he had played football with Petraeus at West Point when he was a cadet at that institution. He also mentioned that he had had long time postings to both Germany and Korea. Now he had retired and he was writing fiction. I mentioned that the cousin of my father, Knute Rockne, had played football in the 1920 and 30ies and coached the games between Notre Dame and West Point. His name was something like Haigh. I thought I would remember the name because of the similarity with the name of a whisky brand. We boarded the same train, continued the conversation and he also helped me to get off the train. NJT has strange ways of depositing passengers when you arrive at a station. Only certain carriages can access certain platforms at a given station and this results in flow of passengers back and forth through the carriages. As an uninitiated NJT traveler I needed help to find my way to the right carriage at the correct station. As I got off the train in New Brunswick I thanked him for the help and said I would look up his books when I go home. Unfortunately, searching the Internet, I was unable to find an author that fitted the name I thought he had mentioned. About two months later I was reading the Herald and there was a whole page article about Alexander Haig, who had effectively taken command of the US Presidency when Nixon was being impeached. I thought, maybe there was a connection to the man I had met in Newark. I read down the page and found that Haig had had three children, of which Brian Haig, born in 1953, was the youngest and that he was living in Hopewell, N.J. I immediately searched for "Brian Haig author" and was presented with a long list of web pages. I opened the first webpage in the list and was immediately presented with a picture of the man I had met on the train. I also found that he had written 5 best selling novels according to the New York Times. One of the web pages is his personal web page.

This was one example of the 1% of interesting events while traveling.