Whenever I travel, I expect to run into someone, usually a person that I know, from Milwaukee.
Granted, a weekend in a Door County isn't exactly a trip to Australia, but I couldn't have been more surprised to run into the four people I saw between Fish Creek and Sister Bay on Sunday and Monday.
It began as I was just walking down Main Street in Fish Creek. I ran into my old friend and co-worker Sara, who was also up for the weekend. Sara is one of my favorite people in Milwaukee, but we're always too busy to connect. Apparently, it's easier to see her randomly, some 300 miles from home.
The next chance meeting happened over dinner on Sunday at the Bayside Tavern. We had met the bartender, Bill Budelman, in previous years, but this time around it only took a few minutes to realize that he's old friends with my coworker Molly Snyder Edler and her husband, and also knows Bobby Tanzilo from their collective time working at the YMCA in the '90s. And not only that, we discovered that Bill lived literally next door to my friend, Eron, who joined me on this trip, back in the '90s in Riverwest.
Later that night, still at the Bayside, a guy stopped me as I was heading to the restroom. He said, "Hey, are you Andy from OnMilwaukee.com?"
Shocked, I said yes, and he told me that's a regular reader of my work and recognized me from my photo. He even said that he read a blog of mine from last week that talked about my upcoming trip to Door County. He and his wife were kind enough to buy us a drink, and we quickly realized that we knew a bunch of the same people, too.
My final encounter happened at breakfast, at the delicious Carroll House in Sister Bay. As I inhaled my eggs and hash browns, in walked a former co-worker that I hadn't seen in at least 10 years. Not only was it surprising to run into Susie up here, seeing her the same weekend as Sara -- the three of us sat in back-to-back cubicles at Cramer-Krasselt in the mid '90s -- what are the odds?
Again, it's not like I was incredibly far from home, but four random incidents -- particularly the two coworkers -- seemed too weird to be true.
Milwaukeeans travel well, this much I know. But this many sightings in such a short time? Somewhere, Kevin Bacon is smiling.
Andy is the president, publisher and founder of OnMilwaukee. He returned to Milwaukee in 1996 after living on the East Coast for nine years, where he wrote for The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau and worked in the White House Office of Communications. He was also Associate Editor of The GW Hatchet, his college newspaper at The George Washington University.
Before launching OnMilwaukee.com in 1998 at age 23, he worked in public relations for two Milwaukee firms, most of the time daydreaming about starting his own publication.
Hobbies include running when he finds the time, fixing the rust on his '75 MGB, mowing the lawn at his cottage in the Northwoods, and making an annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Brewers Spring Training.
