I loved westerns when I was a kid. Miss Kitty and Doc Holiday were welcome in my living room any time. If you’ve ever spent much time in Ocean City, Maryland, you

know all about Frontier Town. It’s a western theme park where the family can have the gun slinging, can can girl kicking, wild indian experience for a small fee. How about that for a dream come true?

We’ve lived here for almost 27 years now, but before that, spent our vacations at Assateague and Ocean City and were fans of Frontier Town. When we first moved here, my husband, Jeff, had his own masonry business and employed, Eddie, a local college student as a helper in the summer. Eddie had spent his high school summers working as a cowboy robbing the Frontier Town train. I told him about the time the kids and I boarded the train and discovered that the treasure chest was stored in our car. Being the concerned citizen that I was, I immediately hid the chest far back under our seat to keep it safe.

The train robber cowboys came directly to our car, but didn’t see the chest. They walked up and down the train track, looking in each car with no luck. They huddled up front as the kids and I giggled, impressed by our clever actions. “Here they come,” I warned. “Don’t laugh, just look away,” I coached my kids on how to out wit the train robbers.This time, the cowboys looked harder and found the box under our seat.

“Hands in the air!” Cowboy Number One ordered and we complied.

“Stand up!” Cowboy Number Two shouted. We stood up with our hands raised.

“Sit down!” hollered Cowboy Number 1. And so we did, up and then down,  up and then down. I had my camera and snapped pictures as the robbery continued and my 9 year old daughter, Mandee, began to cry making me laughed harder. Bad mom, bad mom.

As I shared the story with Eddie, he laughed and said, “Yeah, that happened a lot.” I headed for the living room to find the photo album. I flipped to the pages with the train robbery evidence and there it was. Turned out that Eddie was Cowboy Number One that robbed us that day. If I didn’t know what a small world it was around here before that, I knew it then.

So today, I will head back over to Frontier Town with my two youngest Grandy Girls who are now in double digits. I hope we get the car with the treasure chest. My iPhone is ready for more pictures to put in the album, but I’m thinking it won’t be Eddie stopping the train today. It will be a new Cowboy Number One and Two and chances are, they go to school with one of my grandkids. Small world indeed.