Joseph Sanfilippo

Serendipity: How the wrong place was the right time.

It was the late August summer of 2019. I was embarking on a once in a lifetime opportunity to backpack through parts of central and eastern Europe. At this point, I was leaving Budapest by bus and on my way to a small city called Bratislava in Slovakia since it was on the way to Prague in Czech Republic. Bratislava was only an hour in a half drive from Budapest so I knew it wouldn't be a long excursion. I dozed off for a bit rather passively. When I woke up, I noticed we were close to a bus terminal being that the rural lands off the interstate were behind us. However, I looked around from my seat and there were clearly less people on the bus. Looking at the time, it had been three hours since I boarded the bus. It was then that the driver announced, “We’ll be pulling into Vienna’s station in about five minutes.” To my surprise, I slept long enough to miss my stop and wind up back in Vienna, Austria, where I had stopped a week prior but had no plans on returning. I walked up to the driver and explained my story, which he could only chuckle a bit and then advise me to get off at the next stop and wait for a bus leaving for Bratislava. I was taken aback, but there wasn’t much I could do but heed his advice so I went back to my seat.