A Chance Encounter

As most of you can tell by the absence of blog entries, Concetta and I have been spending several days with our relatives in Akron, Ohio. Mostly what we've been doing, if you want to know, has been eating. We just move from one house to another, one meal to another. In between we just visit and hang out. Consequently, there hasn't been much in the way of adventure going on that I could tell you about.

But two days ago I got a phone call from my buddy John telling me that he and his 70,000 pounds of "pot stickers" were going to be hanging out at a truck stop just a few miles north of Akron for the night and did I want to come up and, what else, have lunch or dinner? (John had been following our progress via our blog) John's a long-haul trucker for a Texas company and just happened to be hauling a load through our immediate area. Well, I jumped at the chance since I hadn't seen John in quite some time.

Fortunately, it was only lightly raining as I hiked the half mile to the Moose Lodge where we're storing the motor home and soon I was headed up I76 to where it joins with I80 north of Akron. I had a little trouble finding the truck stop and the rain changed from drizzle to full on showers, but everything went fine and soon I was parked next door to the truck stop.

Since I didn't know exactly when John was going to arrive, I fired up the motor home's generator, plugged in the computer, and was busily reading email when John called to tell me he had arrived. A few minutes later we had made our rendezvous and were headed south on route 21 for the nearest bistro for a little lunch. We soon found a really great sandwich shop called Brielle's on the west side of the street and spent the rainy afternoon catching up, eating some outstanding potato salad, and drinking hot tea.

Once back at John's truck, we traded our small supply of books on CD, visited some more, then I headed back down the road to Akron as the rain beat enthusiastically on the RV's roof. It had been great seeing John and an amazing coincidence that in all the U.S. our paths would cross here in Concetta's home town.

John and I go back to the 7th grade in Altadena, California, where we grew up in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, spent much of junior high and high school days together, then spent a year aboard a sixty-foot yacht in the Mediterranean working as both boat crew and film crew for a filmmaker shooting a documentary.

Now John is on a different adventure, one that I hope will eventually turn into a book about trucking. He's a talented writer and if anyone can do it, I'm confident he can. If you're interested in reading about John's adventures on the road, type www.roadquill.wordpress.com into your browser and check him out.