She was a broke teenager stranded in a strange town. Then two nuns saved the day

Diann Droste, pictured as a teenager in the 1970s. She regularly travelled on buses alone as a teenager and says she was "pretty fearless." But a particular journey in 1973 had a few unexpected twists and turns. (Courtesy Diann Droste via CNN Newsource)

Peering out the Greyhound bus window, Diann Droste saw the snow coming down fast and thick.

“I remember I was looking out the window and thinking, ‘I don’t know that this is good,’” Diann tells CNN Travel today. “I started to see cars in the ditches, and then I saw semis in the ditches. But I’m 16. And I don’t know what happens in a situation like that, so I just read my book.”

It was January 1973. Diann was a high school junior living in Waterloo, Iowa. She was on her way home from visiting her pen pal, who lived in Brainerd, Minnesota — “the real northern part of Minnesota, where it’s really cold.” The bus ride took more than 10 hours.

“Those Greyhounds make a lot of stops. There was one transfer where I got off the first bus and got on a second,” recalls Diann today. “My children think it’s unusual that I was riding Greyhound buses around the country when I was 16. But we didn’t have money for airplanes.”

Diann describes herself as “pretty fearless,” back then. Or maybe she was just “a teenager at a different time.” Either way, riding a Greyhound bus alone didn’t intimidate her — until the snow started. As the view out of the window disappeared into white, Diann tried to focus on the book in her lap.

“Snow is nothing unusual in the Midwest in January. But very soon, it was snowing hard and the bus was sliding,” she recalls.

The mood on the bus seemed to shift as well.

“I remember thinking these other people on this bus — and the bus was just about completely full — seem a little nervous,” says Diann.

Unexpected detour

There was a collective sense of relief when the bus arrived in the city of Albert Lea, Minnesota. The bus driver exited the interstate and parked outside a Holiday Inn.

“He stopped the bus and said, ‘We can’t go any farther. It’s not safe for me to drive, so we’re going to spend the night here,’” Diann recalls.

For Diann, panic set in immediately.

“Instantly, I thought, ‘Uh oh.’…I had no idea buses stopped like that.”

Diann didn’t have any money. That’s one part of this story her kids still can’t believe. She’d brought about US$25 for the trip, and now, on the return leg, she only had a few dollars left.

She got off the bus, pulled her coat tight around her neck and looked at the other passengers. Everyone else headed straight into the motel. Everyone else also seemed much older — people who instinctively knew what to do when travel plans fell apart.

Diann spotted a pay phone and used a few of her remaining coins to call home. She told her mother what had happened but tried not to alarm her.

“When I told my kids this, I said, ‘Now, if that ever happens to you, call me. I have a credit card.’” Diann says. “But in 1972, ‘73 no one had a cell phone, not everybody had a credit card.”

Her mom didn’t have one. Albert Lea was still two hours from Waterloo, and the weather conditions were too dangerous for her mother to drive to pick her up.

“It was snowing in Iowa also and they were expecting up to a foot of snow overnight,” Diann recalls.

When she hung up, she feared she might be stranded for days.

Inside the Holiday Inn, Diann sat down in a chair in the hotel lobby, under the fluorescent lights. She watched as the other passengers lined up at the front desk, and got rooms.

“No one seemed to even notice me,” she says. “And they all got their rooms and left, and I was sitting in the chair.”

There were no families among the group. No young people — just what Diann thought of as “real adults.” And she was alone and unsure what to do.

“I can’t get a room, because I don’t have any money,” she told herself. She tried to stay calm and formulate a plan. She spotted a sign behind the desk advertising free breakfast.

“That’s something,” she thought. “I’ll stay in this lobby overnight, and in the morning, I’ll eat the free breakfast, and hopefully the bus leaves in the morning.”

The chair wasn’t very comfortable. It was far from an ideal sleeping situation. And Diann didn’t exactly feel at ease in a motel lobby in the middle of nowhere.

But she had her book and tried to distract herself by reading.

Eventually, the lobby emptied. It seemed like all the other Greyhound bus passengers had got their rooms. Then Diann peered over her page to see two pairs of black shoes click-clacking across the lobby floor.

“I thought, ‘Those women are wearing very sensible shoes,’” Diann recalls. “It’s funny the things you remember.”

She looked up. They were two women she recognized from the bus.

“They were probably in their, I’d say, mid-50s, and they were dressed very plainly,” says Diann.

Dark skirts. White blouses. Those sensible shoes.

They smiled at her and kept walking.

“They almost got to the door, and they turned around and they said, ‘Would you like to join us for dinner?’”

Next to the motel was a Perkins, the chain restaurant often found just off U.S. interstates.

At the mention of food, Diann’s stomach rumbled. She was hungry. But she was also broke.

“I didn’t want to tell them I didn’t have any money. I just said ‘No, thank you.’ So they said, ‘Okay,’ and they walked out the door,” says Diann.

But, moments later the sensible shoes returned.

“No kidding, they turned right back around, came back in, and one of them said to me, ‘Will you join us for dinner if we pay for your dinner?’” recalls Diann. “They must have known. I’m sure they knew.”

She said “yes.”

An unlikely friendship

Diann headed out into the snow with the two women. She had a moment of thinking: “I shouldn’t be doing this.” They were strangers. Perhaps it wasn’t safe. But sitting alone in a motel lobby didn’t feel especially safe, either.

At the restaurant, feeling guilty about the idea of two strangers buying her dinner, Diann ordered only a small Coke.

Diann’s new friends immediately intervened. “One of the women said: ‘And she will have a hamburger and french fries to go with that.’ So, when the waitress left, I said to them, ‘I don’t have any money to pay for this.’ They said, ‘We told you we were paying for your dinner.’”

They were warm, but firm. Diann relented. And as she sipped her Coke, she began to relax a little and the group started chatting.

The two women said they were Sisters of Mercy, Catholic nuns.

“That explains the shoes,” Diann thought.

The nuns told her they taught at a Catholic high school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about an hour from Diann’s home. Diann is Catholic and she knew the school, which made her relax a little more. Still, now aware she was dining with two teachers who were also nuns — a first for her on both counts — she was also on her best behaviour.

“They asked me what I was going to do, and I didn’t understand the question. So, I said, ‘Well, I’m only a junior in high school, but I’d like to go to college. I don’t know where.’”

The two women smiled at each other, and then at Diann.

“They said, ‘We mean tonight,’ and I said, ‘Oh, well, I think I’m going to stay in the lobby and maybe sleep in a chair.’”

She saw concern on the two nuns’ faces.

“In the morning, hopefully we can leave,” said Diann, rambling a bit now. “And I can eat breakfast there, because there’s free breakfast …”

The nuns looked at each other, nodding.

“And one of them said, ‘We have a room with two queen beds. Would you like to stay with us?’” Diann recalls.

Looking back, Diann knows how it sounds. Like “something from ‘Dateline,’” she says. “It probably was not the most prudent thing to do, but I felt completely safe with these two women, and I really didn’t want to sleep in the lobby,” she says.

So, she agreed to share their room. Over burgers and fries, Diann became more comfortable with the situation.

“I started out kind of shy with them, but before dinner was over, I was telling them everything. I was telling them what I did in school, and I have five siblings, and I was telling them about that,” she says.

“Would I have felt that comfortable with other adults? I don’t think so. I don’t think I was that comfortable with most of my teachers or anything. … They made me comfortable; in an ordinary situation, I wouldn’t have been that forthcoming with them.”

Night at the motel

Back in the motel room, the group played the card game canasta.

“They taught me how to play and I’ve never played it again. But when I hear the name ‘canasta,’ I think of those two nuns.”

The game was fun. The trio laughed and joked as they played. The Sisters, used to interacting with teenagers from their teaching work, made Diann feel increasingly at ease.

“I was completely safe, completely,” says Diann. “They slept in one bed, I slept in the other. We went to bed kind of early. Woke up early. We went downstairs to have breakfast.”

The atmosphere at breakfast was warm and inviting, different from the night before, when the bus passengers had largely ignored each other.

“The whole climate had changed … People were moving back and forth between the breakfast tables, talking,” says Diann. “It was like camaraderie among the people that were on the bus, people that didn’t know each other before, all were talking because we had shared this experience.”

Diann sat at a table with the nuns. The bus driver assured them no more snow was forecast, so they could leave that morning. Everyone cheered.

An hour later Diann was back on the bus. This time, she didn’t open her book but continued chatting to the nuns and other passengers.

“I sat talking to these two nuns, and I had the best time,” she recalls. “Of all the traveling on buses I did when I was young, I think that was the best trip, just because I met them and got to know them.”

The Greyhound started approaching her home city. Diann spotted Waterloo’s familiar, eight storey Black’s Building department store.

“I was never so happy to see that tall building on the horizon as I was that day,” says Diann.

She knew she was almost home, so she turned to the nuns.

“I said to them, ‘If you give me your name and address, I will send you money for my share of the hotel room.’ They said, ‘Absolutely not.’ And then they wouldn’t tell me where they lived. I said, ‘Well, just tell me where you live. You must live in a convent …”

The nuns batted away the questions. “No, no, no,” they said. They insisted Diann didn’t need to pay them back for their kindness.

The bus pulled to a stop in Waterloo. Out the window, Diann saw her mother waiting to pick her up.

“My mom was always waiting when I returned but this time I was especially grateful to see her and get home,” recalls Diann.

She turned to the nuns, pointing excitedly.

“I told them, ‘Oh good, my mom is here.’ And they said, ‘Can we bless you?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And they said a little prayer.”

Then Diann got off the bus waving goodbye to the nuns and her fellow passengers.

That evening, Diann regaled her family with the tale. Her mother expressed her thanks for the nuns’ kindness. Later, in her bedroom, Diann composed a letter to her pen pal, Arlene, writing in detail about the eventful journey back home.

“When I went back to school, which was probably within a day or two, I remember telling my friends, and they said, ‘You slept in a room with two people you didn’t even know?’ I said, ‘It just doesn’t make sense, does it?’”

Diann no longer recalls the nuns’ names. At the time, it didn’t occur to her to look them up to thank them.

“In today’s world, I could have easily found out who they were,” she reflects. “The internet would have made it easy. I guess I could have written a letter to the school. But I was also 16 and, as I said, 16-year-old girls are pretty clueless.”

Not long afterward, Diann got her driver’s licence and quit riding Greyhounds. She didn’t visit Arlene again. “Maybe I was scared off doing it again after that trip,” she laughs. The two lost touch when Diann went to college but recently reconnected on Facebook and learned they’d both gone on to become nurses.

“I was a registered nurse for 40 years,” Diann says today. “I am married. I am a mother of three and a grandmother of six. She was married and had three kids like mine. Amazing how our lives paralleled each other.”

The two women have since met up a handful of times — though they’ve not travelled by Greyhound bus to do so.

Kindness from strangers

In the five decades since her stayover in Albert Lea, Diann has told her “nuns on the bus” story to her kids and grandkids on many occasions.

She’s used to the quizzical looks at her lack of money, trusting nature and the unlikelihood of the whole thing. But the most important part of the story, for Diann, is how experiencing this kindness from strangers as a teenager shaped her outlook on life.

“When I worked, I had a small note on my desk,” she says. “I read it several times a day and it became my mantra, words I tried to live by. That note said: ‘When you have a choice between being right or being kind, choose kind.’ All these years later, I still remember that great act of kindness by two very kind and intuitive nuns. I tell this story often.

“I was grateful they were there, and I hope that they knew that. I’m sure they’ve long passed away at this point, but I hope they knew that what they did that night affected me forever. And in some ways, I’ve tried to pay it forward. I’ve never had a stranger sleep in my hotel room, but I have been nice to strangers and gone out of my way for them.

“Sometimes I think people just fall into your life for a reason, and those people, those two women, fell into my life for a reason. I’ve often hoped that they thought of me afterward, because I’ve certainly thought of them every single year,” she says.

By Francesca Street, CNN