One of those funny moments in life happened also, as I encountered an older English gentleman, also a tourist, who was walking down the same road looking for his wife after having lost her; she vanished while their group was in the gift shop. He asked me if I saw a lady that looked like this and was wearing that, but I could be of no help. He was stressed because the bus was about to leave, but chuckling at the same time because, he said, it happened all the time, and I couldn't help but laugh a little with him (not that it ever happens to me).
I got lost once, sort of, on the back of a horse. I was five or six years old, and the family decided to rent horses for a trail ride in Oklahoma, next to Lake Texoma where we vacationed every year for a while. Knowing that I was afraid of the big animals they arranged for me to be on the kindest, most gentle horse, whose name was Bill. I remember clearly starting down the trail, me behind the parents and my two older brothers.
Well, we weren't even gone fifteen minutes before Bill made a decision to go back home. True to his nature, he very gently and slowly turned around, not giving a moment's thought of the nervous kid on top of him. And he remained very gentle through the whole trip back, going against the current of the rest of the group, even after I panicked and started screaming and crying and kicking for him to turn around and rejoin the group. Nope, in spite of all that we loped along and made our way clear back to the corral, but not before stopping once to munch on a snack by the side of the trail. And for a while, since we were going in the opposite direction of the others, it was just Bill and me, and mountain lions and bears and all sorts of dangerous animals in the wilderness. I was never so glad to see the corral where we'd started from, and where Bill dutifully stopped so the handler could finally get me off of his back.
I got lost another time, in an airplane, when I was much older, but that's for another day...
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