Funny Stuff

Some years ago, I ran a small business in Toronto, organizing hiking holidays. One year in the fall, I took a group of 45 people from the Toronto area to a small town in New York State for a weekend of hiking in nearby Letchworth State Park. After an ample dinner at our hotel, I invited members of the group to join me on a relaxing walk around town to digest and get some fresh air. About 30 people joined me and so I led the group across the main road to the grounds of what had once been a hospital and associated buildings in a sizeable area of parkland. Enjoying the evening air, we walked around a network of winding roads past the dark, deserted buildings, although some of the apartment blocks in the area had a few lights showing.

As we returned to the main road, two police cars with lights flashing came racing up to meet us. The policeman in the lead car asked me what we were doing wandering around the streets late at night. He accepted my explanation that we were a group of Canadian hikers out for an evening walk. Apparently, someone in one of the occupied buildings had seen us walking past and presumed we were a group of would-be burglars, casing the joint!

A year later, I took another group to the same town for a repeat of the Letchworth weekend. The same series of events occurred during our Friday evening walk—even the same policeman came racing up to meet us. He rolled down his window, looked at me and exclaimed, “Oh, no—not your group again!”

The following year, I decided to make a pre-emptive strike. As our group was gathering in the hotel foyer, I asked the lady at the reception desk to phone the local police and tell them that the Canadian hiking group was going out for its evening walk, and not to bother sending a squad car to investigate. Perhaps not surprisingly, a police car did not show up!