… portation. I won’t even go into my several driving close calls where my family and I were a hair away from death. But…
My daughter was in Madrid this morning on a break for her semester studying abroad, and had planned to take that train with her friends, but reconsidered to a closer venue because of logistics that made it more travel for them. She told me that at one point the train they ultimately took stopped for about half a minute just about that time, and then continued.
As stressful as hearing that was, it reminded me of these other family close calls.
— The L.A Metro had a crash in the valley many years ago (many here may remember). At the time my son lived near me but communited to L.A. when he worked for the Clippers. He took the same train home every day, but this one day he unusually got off an hour early and took the prior train. His usual train had a fatality crash.
— My wife (before I knew her) took a train from Belfast back to Dublin. The next Dublin train after hers was blown up.
— I was visiting my Uncle Bob and Aunt Mary in a Boston suburb when I was a kid. My uncle worked a lot, so it was no surprise that he wasn’t there when I woke up. But the plane he was taking his business trip on crashed and everyone was killed. I distinctly recall my Aunt (when she heard) was uncontrollably distraught, until she got a call… from Uncle Bob saying that he missed his plane. (And no, they were not the inspiration for the expression “Bob’s your uncle, Mary’s your aunt ;-).
Unlucky in sports, lucky in life I suppose.