It's amazing what strangers will tell each other. We stayed at a motel in Mitchell, SD last night. I went down to breakfast and there were two couples, one from Rapid City and the other from North Dakota. There were talking about their families and big city traffic letting each other know how much they travel. They left and I read my paper. A guy came in and since I had a Wyoming shirt on, he asked the obvious question which is am I from Wyoming. Turns out he lives in Ames, Iowa, which, of course, is a big connection for me. He was a family counselor while I was a school counselor.
We'll never see each other again but for a few minutes we bonded verbally.