Now when I say crazy situations I don’t necessarily mean
crazy scary or crazy dangerous. Sometimes an experience has been downright
unbelievable or really, really lucky or stupidly, ridiculously funny. The sort
of stories I won’t even wait to tell when I get home after my trip…I’ll be
telling them in the car on the way home from the airport.
One such story happened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania a few
years back. I was travelling solo in the City of Brotherly Love and had been to
all the must do’s already – the Liberty Bell, the US Mint, UPenn, the LOVE sign
and even Amish country. But I knew there was one more must do on my list – the Rocky
statue and steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Now I have never seen a
Rocky movie in my life, I’m not a fan of Sylvester Stallone at all and I had
zero interest in boxing OR modern art. But I still felt like I had to see it as
part of my time in Philly so I wanted to tick it off my list.
So on my rainy last day in Philly before I headed to NYC, I
caught the bus to the museum and proceeded to walk around for at least an hour
trying to find this bloody statue with no luck. I was getting frustrated that
the grounds were so large and I couldn’t seem to find what should surely be an
attraction swarming with tourists just like myself. Eventually I went inside
the museum and asked a staff member for directions. She looked me up and down
with a disgusted look on her face (obviously thinking I was such a philistine)
and gruffly gave me directions before walking off in a huff to the real
appreciators of art. Awks. So outside into the gloom and doom of that wet June
day I went again. As I was nearing the statue (although I had no idea still
that I was close to it) a guy and a girl were approaching me on the same
footpath from the other direction. They were laughing their heads off and
scoffing at something that seemed like the biggest joke in the world. I went to
smile as we passed each other but then they stopped. “Oh my god! When you get
to the statue you have to say ‘I want to go to Fairfax, Virginia this summer’
to those people over there!” they exclaimed, pointing at a group of three people
standing about 30 metres away from us.
“Why?” I asked, cautiously laughing myself, but not really
sure these people were the full quid.
“Trust us, just do it!” and then they ran off.
I really had little intention of doing it, but when I got
closer to them I could see they were standing near the Rocky statue, and since
I had tried for hours to find this thing, in the rain, and my sneakers were
pretty much soaked through and my bag was getting heavy, I was damned if I wasn’t
going to get my photo with this landmark before I returned to Australia, so I
thought I would ask them if they would take my photo for me.
They happily obliged and afterwards as I said thankyou I
remembered what the guy and the girl five minutes earlier had said, and decided
what the hell?
“Thanks for taking my photo,” I said with a grin. “By the
way, I really want to go to Fairfax, Virginia this summer.”
Well they just Lost. Their. Shit. “YES!” they yelled and
pointed over my shoulder at a man standing behind me dressed up as George
Washington. “You’re the last one to win!”
And with that George handed me an envelope and a bundle of
brochures from the tourist bureau of Fairfax. You can imagine the look on my
face, but I played along, thinking, who are these nutjobs and what have I won?
They explained that the promotion they were running was going to award $100 to
the first three people to go up to them and say ‘I want to go to Fairfax,
Virginia this summer’, and apparently I was number three (I guess the guy and
girl I’d seen earlier who had given me the hint were numbers one and two)!
The volunteers took my picture with the George Washington
impersonator and then cheerily wished me a great day and said they hoped to see
me in Fairfax one day soon. All my thoughts of why I had originally wanted to
come to the museum that day were completely washed away by then, as you can
imagine. I smiled and thanked them and walked back off in the direction I came
as they packed up their pamphlets and left, no more prizes to give out.
I waited until I was a safe distance away from them before
opening the envelope they’d given me. I didn’t really believe they’d given me
$100. For free? Just for saying some cheesy line? No way. But lo and behold,
when I ripped open the envelope I looked inside to discover $100 in one dollar
bills staring back at me. That’s right – one hundred one dollar bills. Because
George Washington is the president who features on the one dollar bill. Duh (and
I guess he was also from Fairfax, Virginia?).
I was shocked and then started laughing not dissimilar to
how the guy and girl earlier had been laughing. Did I just get a hundred bucks
for free? What? This was too good to be true! The rest of the day I spent
marvelling at my good luck, and the irony of how I hadn’t even seen the Rocky
movies, how I had had so much trouble finding the statue and the iconic steps
from the film, how the woman inside the museum had looked at me with such a
disgusted look on her face when I had asked for directions, how I hadn’t even
been super keen to leave the hostel at all that morning because it had been
such miserable weather. And yet I had gone, and this had happened.
Totally worth it.
That moment and the Amish food I tried whilst in
Pennsylvania remain my strongest memories of my time there.
What crazy things have happened to you whilst travelling?
Have you ever had a stroke of luck like this? Leave me a comment and tell me
all about it. I’d love to hear from you! And while you’re there don’t forget to
follow me on Instagram @brindabella24 !
Until next time…
Jorgs and George Dubbya
You write well, Larissa. Always fun to read.
ReplyDelete