Wanna hear a fun story? I haven’t written much since summer began, but I’ve been wanting to tell this one since it happened. It involves a few good staples of any summer vacation and a big dose of kindness.
I’m assuming by now you’ve all heard about the US Women’s soccer team winning that World Cup. Well, before they did that, a few of my friends and I made a last minute plan to go see the gals play the ladies from Germany in a semifinal game in Montreal. We considered flying there, but plane tickets were a wee bit expensive with only a few days notice, sooooo…
…ROAD TRIP!! Isn’t a road trip one of the best parts of summer?
Car games…
…fellow fans driving by…
…and RoadTrip Radio! Even though they wouldn’t let me play this one loud in the border crossing line.
Speaking of lines, let me cut to the best part of this story. The whole trip was awesome…we walked out of our hotel on the way to the game just in time to see the team leaving their hotel across the street (Heeyyyy, Pinoe!), some nice Canadian bartender made us custom red, white and blue cocktails, we went on a little hike and especially the win, but I think we all agreed on our favorite moment.
We were feeling so excited as we walked to the metro station on our way to the stadium! It might have had a bit to do with those America inspired drinks or else the Canadian beer, but mostly it was the hype of the game. Lots of people were walking the streets in Montreal all decked out in their USA fan gear. It almost looked like the 4th of July. What I guess we hadn’t thought so much about, was that all those people were going to the same place we were, so that when we walked into the metro station our pre-game bubbles deflated. There was a crazy long line to buy tickets. Super long. All the way back to the back wall of the station long. Our hearts sank as we tried to squeeze into line. I think we were all thinking the same thing, that we would miss the beginning of the game now. But we didn’t have a chance to say it or even really let the disappointment sink in, because the second we stepped into line, a man walked up to us and asked, “Are there four of you?” We all nodded, not sure what he wanted. And then…he made our night!! “Here you go!” he said and he fanned out four metro tickets in front of us. “Wait. What? For us?” And then he explained, “Yeah, we just waited in that line and wanted to let someone else not have to. Here you go! Have fun!” OOOH! MY! GOOOOSH!! Wasn’t that just a sweet and kind and super fun thing to do?! He just bought extra tickets to give away. And he gave them to us! Can you imagine our excitement? It went a little something like this: THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! And then we ran! We fumbled with how to work the tickets at the turnstile, and then we ran some more. Straight down the wrong set of stairs to the wrong track. That’s when another nice man said, “Uh…ladies. Do you want to be on the other side?” We darted a look across the tracks and saw our people, all red, white and blue on the other side. YES! Yes, we definitely want to be on the other side! We yelled out some more thank yous and took off running again. We were smiling and laughing the whole way to the stadium. We made it with just minutes to spare before the gals took the field and the whole night we kept saying, “Remember when that guy just gave us metro tickets?!”
And we vowed to pay it forward. Because making it to the start of the game wouldn’t have been nearly as great if we hadn’t almost not made it to the start of the game. It was the kindness of a total stranger that fixed that. He made us so happy! Thanks again, metro man!
And to all the people we cut in front of, I’m sorry. But not really. I am a little bit sorry for taking a picture of you, Backwards Hat Girl, while you were looking kinda miserable and I was looking and being so happy. I’ll try to make it up by being kind to some other stranger sometime soon.
35tomatoes 