My pals and I decide to join a town-sponsored bus tour to Montreal. This is a great idea! The price is right (includes two nights in a 4-star high-rise hotel plus two meals and an extra tour of the city), and the company running it has a solid reputation. Our tour guide is a former elementary teacher, so she talks in short, simple sentences and smiles a lot. Our bus driver, Thom, is the bomb. We discover early on that he can out-maneuver any road hazard known to man.
There are two glitches in the itinerary, though. The first glitch is that most of these kinds of tours are populated by blue-hairs. Okay, so I am very close to being a blue hair, but I am in limbo between an AARP card and collecting Social Security. This means that there is rampant arthritis on the bus, so we stop every hour or so to prevent deep-vein thrombosis. The second glitch is a parade in Montreal that blocks our access to the hotel until later than we planned.
The tour director decides that we will stop in Burlington, Vermont, today instead of our planned stop at the end on our return trip. Sounds good to us. This will be stop #2. Stop #1 is a McDonalds in Lebanon, NH. My friends and I head over to the beer and wine mart, instead, to buy lottery tickets. I am thrilled to find sealed single-servings of Cabot cheddar cheese and get myself one extra sharp and one seriously sharp slices of cheese.
When we head back over to McDonalds, my friend's husband strikes up a conversation with a man wearing a WWII hat. Remarkably, this gentleman is one of the original Tuskegee Airmen. For those not in the know, the Tuskegee Airmen were the first African-American pilots to be trained in the U.S., officially forming the 477th Bombardment Group and the 332nd Fight Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces. This wonderful gentleman lives nearby, and my pal's spouse has an animated chat before we are herded back onto the bus.
My pals and I settle outside at an Irish pub. We are next to a girl and her dog, a very friendly dog, and eventually we strike up a conversation with her. Turns out she is with the Air Corps and is part of maintaining the jets that are flying over, apparently scaring the shit out of the delicate hippies of Burlington. "They keep calling 911," she explains.
She tells us about the planes that we missed seeing by our late arrival, and then she starts talking about a Tuskegee Airman who lives over the border in New Hampshire, a gentleman who comes for the air show when he can.
We barely believe the coincidence. My friend's husband just talked to the gentleman about two hours earlier at a random exit off I-89, quite far from where we are right now. We hone in on the young lady's privacy and keep up a conversation with her and with her dog.
Before we head back to the bus, we go inside the restaurant to use the bathroom, and my pal beats me to the punch: paying for the servicewoman's order. We are a military bunch: My pals have family members in the service, and I have a niece coming out of the Marines, as well as a brother-in-law who is retired Air Force, my late uncle was Army in Korea, my late father was OSS/Army in WWII in the European theater, and my grandfather was in WWI.
It turns out to be a worthy stop. Thank goodness for arthritis and thrombosis and a random parade. Montreal, here we come!
