Cycle touring coincidences

Cycle-touring, Expeditions, Adventures, Major cycle routes NOT LeJoG (see other special board)
bikepacker
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Cycle touring coincidences

Post by bikepacker »

Those of us who do a lot of cycle touring probably have experienced coincidences whilst on tour. A couple of recent ones come to mind:

Two weeks ago while on a round the coast tour of Scotland I stayed in a remote walker’s bunkhouse. Among the other occupants was a guy who obviously hailed from the Black Country where I was born. He like me had long since moved away. Exploring our younger days there we both realised that we grew up within a few miles of each other and about 56 years ago I dated his sister for a few weeks. Unfortunately she is no longer with us.

The other was when I was doing an East to West. After leaving Lowestoft I cycled through the town of Beccles, even taking a photo by the yacht station there. 10 days later I got to Glencoe and camped on the site by the Loch. While having a stroll around I got in conversation with a lady walking her dog. She said her home was in Beccles, I happened to say that I passed through there. She asked if it was the Saturday night about 5pm because her husband returning from the shopping, had remarked about a cyclists with a loaded bike passing by their house. Needless to say it was.

What coincidences have others of you had while on a cycle tour or cycle holiday?
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NATURAL ANKLING
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by NATURAL ANKLING »

Hi,
Not in cycling but I was on holiday in north devon and met a guy I used to work with, the same guy that I bumped into on Dartmoor whilst walking in the mist albeit on a old railway track.
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Swallow
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by Swallow »

A few years ago I was cycling the Nante Brest canal when I met a Frenchman coming the other way on a recumbent trike. He saw the CTC badge on my bar bag so stopped for a chat, he was in his 80s, stick thin and brown as a berry. He asked where I was from, I said Falmouth in Cornwall, and he said he had once been there to pick up a Moulton.
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Sweep
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by Sweep »

Good thread bikepacker - life can be so spooky at times it's enough to make you paranoid.

Have had a few spooky/odd things happen a few times but not on a bike so will spare folks them.

Sleep well folks - they aren't necessarily out to get you/following you .....
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TonyR
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by TonyR »

Sweep wrote:Sleep well folks - they aren't necessarily out to get you/following you .....


But remember, just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
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Cunobelin
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by Cunobelin »

My mother is scary with this


We were in a shopping mall and she was going up the escalator....

When we met her at the top she turned and said:

"You see that woman over there going down, she lived in Ayr and went to school with my sister... we are going to meet up for coffee in about half an hour"

How do you transfer all that information whilst passing on an escalator!!!!
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Cunobelin
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by Cunobelin »

Whilst cycle touring in Cornwall / Devon, I stopped off in a pub for lunch to find the landlord of my local in there!
iviehoff
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by iviehoff »

The thing about coincidences is that there are so many potential coincidences, it would be surprising if they didn't from time to time occur. The ones OP cites don't seem particularly strong.

These seem rather stronger.

I went into a hostel in New Zealand. There was only one other person staying there. He knew my sister, (who has never been to New Zealand).

I went into another hostel in New Zealand and bumped into a woman who I had seen in Manali in the Indian Himalayas about 18 months previously. She had no recollection of me, but had to agree she had been there, moreover in specific location a few miles from town.

Cycling in Switzerland, I bumped into the French cyclist who had written the route notes that another cyclist had given me while I was cycling in South America a year or two previously.

Cycling in London, I stopped at some lights and came up alongside someone who had been my boss at a job I'd done in Birmingham a few years previously.

In two consecutive cycling holidays to Iceland, I randomly bumped into the same geologist from Lancaster University. On each occasion we were thrown together for an extended period, sitting next to each other on a bus, sharing a room in a guesthouse.

A cycling friend recently introduced me to a friend of his from Wales, whose brother who lives next door to one of my aunts in Dorset.

I cycled to the top of the Honister Pass to find one of my colleagues from work in London there in his car.

We need to be careful. Some things are just likely. If I bump into acquaintances at Marylebone station, this is not surprising because I am frequently there - if they go there only once, it is nevertheless not so very unlikely that they will be there at the same time as me because I am there so often. I have friends and work colleagues who also regularly commute to Marylebone like me, including one who frequently uses the same train. What I find more remarkable is how I can go for several years and not bump into some of the people I know who also regularly use the station. This latter fact makes it more remarkable when you do bump into someone you know in London, when neither of you was in fact engaged in any common purpose or regular trip.

With that in mind, I will be forever struck with an incident which occurred one day when I decided not to board a tube train as it was too crowded. Only one other passenger on the busy platform made that same decision, and it was someone I knew. Neither of us was on a regular journey.
Urticaria
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by Urticaria »

iviehoff wrote:The thing about coincidences is that there are so many potential coincidences, it would be surprising if they didn't from time to time occur. The ones OP cites don't seem particularly strong.
That is often given as an explanation, but has anyone ever studied it? Does meeting a friend on a mountain summit occur more frequently than it ought to, for example?
I once heard on the radio of a synchronicity where a man had broken down in village tens of miles from home. He was near a phone booth, when the phone rang, he picked it up and it was his wife wanting to know something. She was unaware that she had misdialled.
iviehoff
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by iviehoff »

The chances of winning the UK national lottery standard draw are about 1 in 14,000,000. 1 in 14,000,000, how could it happen, we would say of many things. But in the case of the lottery, we are well aware that millions of tickets are sold each week, so we are unsurprised about regular winners.

How many people do you know well enough that to bump into them in a remote place would be a coincidence - 500? So you happened to bump into one of the 50 people from your office, but you might also have remarked on someone from your tennis club or one of the waitresses at the coffee shop you go to, etc. Since I commented on someone who knew my sister and someone who lived next door to my aunt, 500 might even be rather on the low side. So there are about 65,000,000 people in the country, so when you randomly bump into someone, that they are someone you know is already down to only about 100,000. How long does it take before you pass 100,000 people? I pass thousands a day on my journey to work. Then there's the fact that communities tend to follow similar routes. When I bumped into the same person in a town in north India and later in a hostel in New Zealand, these were both the kind of place where a particular kind of tourist is likely to go, thus greatly narrowing down the possibility.

Clearly "coincidence" is such a vague and broad concept it is hard to do science on it. But a great many weird things are remarked upon, and if they are sufficiently well defined it can often be shown that the occurrence was in fact likely, or not so very unlikely as not to occur from time to time. Many analyses of this nature have been performed.

Humans have not been designed to be naturally skilled at making statistical judgments. It is easy to fool us with apparent statistical paradoxes. This much has been consistently shown by experiment.
axel_knutt
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by axel_knutt »

"You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"

Richard Feynman
“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
PaulB
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by PaulB »

Not a cycling one but a few years ago I was on Holiday in Grindelwald, Switzerland and bumped into my Nephew and family who had decided to go camping there. At the same time my cousins who live at the other end of England to me were holidaying in Wengen just the other side of the hill.
TonyR
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by TonyR »

When I lived in Japan my sister decided to visit from Seattle. The day after she arrived we were leaving our apartment when we bumped into our next door neighbour who had her brother visiting from New York. My sister and her brother instantly recognised each other. They had sat next to each other on the flight which had gone from New York via Seattle to Tokyo.
uppadine
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by uppadine »

I was doing the Yorkshire Dales Cycle Way alone, and struggling up the very quiet, remote Coverdale. The only place I could find to stop and hope for food was the tiny pub in Horsehouse (bar about the size of a small living room). I opened the door and came to face with my village postman as he was leaving, on a walking holiday. There were no other people there and I stayed for a bowl of soup for half an hour.
Sooper8
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Re: Cycle touring coincidences

Post by Sooper8 »

axel_knutt wrote:"You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"

Richard Feynman


Very good. I like this one. This nails it.
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