Excuse me...are you Kevin and Ruth?

This has to be one of the strangest questions that we have heard in our travels. It's when someone actually recognizes us because of this blog. It's only happened to us three or four times over the years, but it's so totally strange when it does.

And yesterday we had it happen again!

So we had finished our coffee and tea and had a morning chat with our hosts CJ and Kathy. The sky was kind of overcast, and they were calling for some showers so we decided we wanted to go out for a walk before it started raining.

Killarney, Manitoba is a town of about 2,500 people but it balloons to about 4,000 over the summer months. It's situated on a pretty lake, and it's only 20 kms (13 miles) from the U.S. border. There are a couple of big RV parks here, but with mostly seasonal sites and some pretty reasonable seasonable rates.

We decided to walk down to the water.

Killarney Lake.

Kevin at the Blarney Stone. Do you think maybe there's some Irish history to this area?

The park is getting a new water playground for the kids.

We walked from there up through one of the RV Parks and then the main street through town. At the end of town near the railway tracks is the old grain elevator. These old wooden buildings are still pretty majestic looking even though most of them are getting a little run down.

The old Killarney grain elevator.

We turned around and started heading back to CJ and Kathy's house. Just got off the main drag and we saw a pickup truck go by and it seemed they were pointing in our direction. The truck came about and started up to a parking area near where we were walking. They pulled up and a guy got out of the truck. Walking towards us, he has a big grin on his face, and he says...

"Excuse me...are you Kevin and Ruth"?

"Ummm.....yeah. I guess....kind of depends who's asking", we reply cautiously with a smile.

By this time, the other occupants of the truck had gotten out and gathered around. Turns out that Dan, his wife Karen, and family had been following our blog over the years, and had been down in Mexico a couple of winters ago with their own motorhome.

Funny thing about this, was that Dan and I had had several facebook conversation related to RV'ing in Mexico and we had even tried to meet up with them this past winter when they were in Huatulco on a family vacation without the motorhome. We were passing through the area with the little blue car. It just didn't come together, and we never did meet up.

But the story gets stranger. We didn't know that Dan and family lived in Killarney, Manitoba. And that both he and CJ (the guy we're staying with here) know each other! Remember, it's only a small town of 2,500 people.

Stranger still was that Dan and Karen had not recently checked our blog and didn't know that we were coming this way! So they were driving by and said to each other, "hey, I'm sure that's Kevin and Ruth"! Having never met us before.

Kevin, Ruth, Dan, Toby, Karen, Oliver.

Dan and Karen are adventurous travelers themselves, having driven a van with their two young boys, Toby and Oliver, from England to India back in 1999! If you check the route that you have to take to get from England to India by road, you will know that these people had quite an adventure!!

So we stood there for a few minutes, all shaking our heads at this amazing meeting. But it was over far too quickly and we would have loved to have spent more time with these people. They were busy working, running the family bricklaying business and tomorrow they were driving down to Minneapolis to buy a different motorhome they had bought from eBay. Simply no time to get together. Hopefully we'll meet up again some day.

Back at CJ and Kathy's, we took a pic of their home.

Another strange coincidence? Dan and his sons had done a lot of the restoration of the stonework on CJ and Kathy's house. Weird, huh??

CJ and Kathy are still finishing up some major renovations to their old house. This is the sign hanging above the entrance!

In the afternoon, they took us for a drive around town and showed us the sights. There are two large campgrounds here, and if you wanted to spend the whole summer, they have some pretty reasonable rates!

In the evening, Ruth made us all a batch of chicken enchiladas, and Kathy baked a peach pie. We've enjoyed our day of rest here in Killarney. Thanks for having us CJ and Kathy!

Next up, Grand Forks, North Dakota!