A Huge Surprise!
Today was the funeral of Bob Mills, who owned the beach hut next to ours in Sussex. We attended the service in Leatherhead, but decided not to stay for the gathering afterwards, as we don't know the family very well and there was a large number of people present.
We arrived home and were parking in our drive, when we glanced out of the gate. To our utter amazement, Darian and Maria were walking past our house!! We thought we were seeing things, but it was indeed them and we asked them into the house. They told us their daughter, Nicole, and her husband had recently bought a house in the road immediately behind ours! Darian and Maria had flown back from Reykjavik this morning after a 4x4 tour of Iceland and are staying tonight with Nicole and her husband before their flight to Brisbane tomorrow. They were passing our house to catch the bus to go and hear Nicole singing in a choir tonight. In fact, before the cruise, they had been staying with Nicole for a week and had walked past our house every day to go to the station or to use "our" bus stop!! We couldn't get over the coincidence and the fact that, had we stayed longer at the funeral or they hadn't been going to the concert, they could have been so close to us, but we would never have known! We could barely believe that a couple from Brisbane, whom we had last seen on a ship in Iceland, could be walking past our house in Herne Hill!
We were especially thrilled to see them as we had missed them in Reykjavik. Now we were able to exchange email addresses and phone numbers and will be able to keep in touch. We look forward to seeing them when they come to visit their family.
