Her boyfriend fell asleep on the train. Then she spent the six-hour journey talking to her future husband

New Zealander Maire Clifford met Edinburgh resident Andy Bain on the train from London to the Scottish capital, in the year 2000. The connection, says Maire, was "unreal." (Maire & Andy Bain via CNN Newsource)

New Zealander Maire Clifford was gazing out the window on a train traveling from London to Edinburgh, Scotland.

The train was weaving north out of King’s Cross station, with cityscapes gradually morphing into stretches of green fields.

It was the year 2000. Maire was in her late 20s and had been living in the U.K. for a couple of years. She was currently dating a bartender, who was joining her on the trip.

Gazing out the window was only interesting up to a point — and Maire’s boyfriend was out cold, fast asleep in the seat next to her. The train journey was set to take six hours.

“I was like, ‘Okay, this is going to be really boring,’” Maire recalls to CNN Travel today. “So I went through to the smoking carriage.”

Back in the early 2000s, the U.K. had yet to introduce a smoking ban on public transport. In designated areas of the London to Edinburgh train, passengers were permitted to light a cigarette.

Back then, Maire was a social smoker. She walked into the smoking area of the train and found it almost empty, aside from a young guy with a large backpack.

She asked him for a light and he obliged, smiling.

“And then somehow I sat down, and we started talking,” recalls Maire. “And I just remember being struck by how easy, like there was a real sense of familiarity.”

The man with the lighter

The man with the lighter was Andy Bain, a 27-year-old who’d grown up in England with Scottish family. Now he was based in Edinburgh, but he’d just returned from a stint traveling across Tanzania and Zanzibar.

“That was me going home to Edinburgh — having been overseas — on the train where we met for the first time,” Andy tells CNN Travel.

Time away from the U.K. had given Andy the headspace to think and reconsider his approach to life, relationships, work and travel.

“I’d kind of not had a great relationship prior to Maire, and not really any great relationships, I guess,” he reflects today. “I’m not putting any blame or anything. People just are wrong for each other. But I made this conscious decision that I wasn’t going to be seeking a relationship. I wasn’t going to basically talk to anyone or put myself out there in any way, shape or form. I just needed to get my head back together.”

Then, while camping in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, Andy was struck by the incredible beauty of the landscape and reassessed this approach.

“It’s this beautiful natural safari reserve and we were camping right on the rim of it,” he recalls. “I got up in the morning and there was a herd of zebras drinking from the campsite waterfall… I kind of just sat there, and I was like, ‘Well, whatever you’ve done in your life, or whatever has been done to you — good or bad — it’s led you to this amazing thing, which is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life.’ And then I was just like, ‘Well, I think it’s just time to get back out there, open yourself up again to the world and see what happens.’”

Andy flew back to London, happened to miss his booked train to Edinburgh and ended up, by coincidence, on the same train as Maire.

Andy will never forget the moment Maire first walked through the door of the carriage.

“I’m sitting in the smoking compartment, and then the train starts, and then the door slides open and this one walks through and looks at me and says, ‘Have you got a light?’” recalls Andy, smiling.

“So not only was it immediately after I’d kind of said, ‘I’m going to open myself up to the world.’ But I’d missed the train that I was supposed to be on. And then the first person that I really met after that decision, through that kind of happy accident, was Maire.”

Today, looking back, Andy says the series of unexpected, life changing events made him “believe in fate.”

But in that moment, on that day on the train in the year 2000, neither Andy nor Maire had any idea of the significance of their meeting.

For one, from the outset, Maire told Andy she was traveling with a boyfriend. They both saw their unexpected travel connection as grounded in potential friendship, rather than romantic promise.

Still, Maire was struck by the thought that “the connection was unreal” with Andy. They were strangers, but they opened up quickly.

“He obviously told me the story that he just shared with you about the Ngorongoro Crater,” says Maire. “That’s also what I was struck by… I think that it takes a certain type of person to be able to notice those special moments when they happen.”

In turn, Maire shared stories of her childhood in New Zealand, of moving to the U.K. and her subsequent travels across Europe.

It felt, she says, like “both of us had that approach to life of just, I think, really noticing the special moments and being impressed by the beauty in the world.”

After a while, Maire’s mind turned back to her sleeping boyfriend in the other carriage. She figured she should go back and check on him. But she found him where she’d left him, still out cold.

“He was still sleeping. So then came back to Andy’s carriage, and so we just talked and talked over the rest of the six-hour, seven-hour journey,” says Maire. “I remember him saying to me, ‘Oh, you’re a really sound lady.’”

She’d never really heard the expression before — it seemed very British, and made her laugh.

Andy was sweet, Maire thought. But there was nothing obviously romantic between them. It was just a connection, a potential friendship, forged on a train speeding up to Scotland. Both figured it was as likely they’d never meet again. But they enjoyed the moment.

“It was a really easy chat,” says Andy. “Just kind of our whole general vibe just clicked…I don’t remember thinking, ‘She’s really hot,’ you know, or anything like that. It was just, ‘She’s really cool.’ And it was really, really nice just to have just such an easy conversation with someone. There was no effort. It was just so, so simple.”

“It wasn’t like, ‘Ah he’s hot,’” agrees Maire. “It was just like, ‘Ah, he’s cool.’”

As the train continued up the East Coast main line, tracing the coastline at North Berwick before offering travelers their first glimpse of Arthur’s Seat, the ancient extinct volcano that looms over Edinburgh, Maire spontaneously wrote down her email address on Andy’s leftover anti-malaria tablet packet.

“Stay in touch,” she said, before saying goodbye.

Staying in touch

When Maire left the smokers’ carriage, Andy heard the two travelers behind him react.

“They were two younger guys, sitting behind me — and one just turned to the other and went ‘Un-flipping-believable,’” Andy recalls, laughing. “Because to them, I’d just been sitting there, and then this hot chick sat down, and we’d got on, and then swapped details. I mean, that just doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t happen. I just remember that was just really funny.”

The train pulled into Edinburgh Waverly station and Andy hauled his bag onto his back and traipsed back to his apartment. Meanwhile, Maire disembarked the train with her boyfriend for the sightseeing weekend in Scotland.

“When I got off the train… and that whole weekend around Edinburgh, I kept, even though I was with that other person, I kept thinking, ‘I hope I bump into that guy Andy again,’” recalls Maire.

She didn’t. But a week or so later, Maire dropped Andy a friendly email: “Hey traveling man,” the message began.

“And then we started emailing back and forth,” she recalls.

A couple weeks later, Maire told her best friend Trudy about her new pen pal. She described the story of how they’d met on the train, kept each other company for the duration of the journey and swapped details.

“I remember Trudy saying to me, ‘I think that there’s something between you two.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. He’s so nice. Just a good friend.’

But the emails didn’t drop off. In fact, they became more frequent as the weeks turned into months.

“We ended up just communicating on the reg, and that progressed from emails to phone calls,” recalls Maire.

By then, Maire’s bartender boyfriend was in the past. But she still didn’t see Andy as a potential love interest.

“Then, for my birthday, he sent me a book: ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’” recalls Maire. “It just so happened to be, not that he knew this, my favorite childhood book. And as I unwrapped it, and I hadn’t seen that book cover for decades, it just really touched a deep part in me. I felt really seen that he would select such a cool present for me.”

Andy genuinely had no idea of the significance of the book for Maire. He’d been inspired to buy it for her after an email exchange where he’d shared he was stressed at work and Maire offered some advice.

“She’d said, ‘Oh just imagine that we’re on a boat, floating in the sea, and everything’s really relaxing,’” he says. “And then in my head, what I saw was the boat from ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’”

Andy and Maire’s shared love of the Maurice Sendak picture book felt like another sign of their deep connection. And shortly afterwards, Andy called Maire to let her know he’d be down in London for work.

“We arranged to go out in Shoreditch that night and have a big catch up,” recalls Maire. “We went out and got pretty trashed.”

Maire ended up crashing at Andy’s hotel. But just as a friend. Nothing romantic happened between them.

“We were still just good friends,” says Andy. “When I said, ‘You can come and stay in my hotel room, it was literally as a mate.’”

“I jokingly say, it’s probably because I had a bit of lettuce hanging off my cheek from falling asleep into my kebab,” says Maire. “But I really felt like he proved in that moment that he’s a man of integrity, and a man that I could be safe around, and that he was who I thought he was.”

The next day, Andy struggled through a hangover at his work training course. But on the train back to Edinburgh, his phone buzzed with a message from Maire.

“I remember getting a text from her just going, ‘I’ve come home with the biggest smile on my face, and it’s all because of you. Andy Bain. It was just such a great, great evening.’”

Andy smiled back at his Nokia 8110 cell phone. Then he found himself thinking back on their conversations from the night before.

“We just chatted about stuff that felt important to us as people,” he says. “It wasn’t small talk… And then the next thing, Maire was talking about coming up to Edinburgh for Hogmanay (Scottish New Year’s Eve celebrations) with a group of friends.”

A Hogmanay to remember

Andy immediately invited Maire and her friends to stay with him in Edinburgh.

But while Maire’s friends celebrated the new year in the city’s bars and pubs, Andy and Maire largely stayed in Andy’s apartment, spending every moment together deep in conversation.

“That first night, we sat on the sofa and we talked for eight hours,” Maire recalls. “About halfway through that conversation, he says to me, ‘Do you believe in soulmates… Because I think that you’re mine.’”

This conversation was still couched in terms of friendship. But the two spent the next “three days together, just talking.”

“And then, on the third day, we’re sitting there talking, and he reaches over and he puts his hand on my knee, and he says, ‘I really love you,’” recalls Maire.

“And I’m like, ‘I really love you too.’ And he’s like, ‘No, I’m in love with you.’”

Maire stared at Andy, in disbelief, for a moment. But deep down, she knew his words were true. That she felt the same.

“We hadn’t even kissed,” she says today.

“It was just our values on things were so the same,” explains Andy. “Our experiences of things were so the same… That’s why I said the soulmate thing. Because it just felt different to any other kind of friendship that I’d ever had. It hit me, the realization that, ‘I just love you. I’m in love with you.’”

Andy said the words aloud without thinking. He knew they were true. They felt right.

“It wasn’t a play, or it wasn’t a move, or it wasn’t something that I really thought about,” he says. “It was just, it was a physical need that I needed to say it.”

Still, something had shifted between Maire and Andy in that moment.

“I knew that despite my fear of ruining our amazing connection, I had to give it a shot,” Maire says.

“We kissed for the first time,” says Andy. “It wasn’t a disaster, all of that kind of good stuff. We were compatible as boyfriend and girlfriend, as well as friends.”

Maire went back to London, but she returned a week later to surprise Andy for his birthday.

“She had phoned loads of my friends and we had this impromptu party,” he recalls. “It was really lovely, one of the nicest things that anyone’s ever done for me.”

A meaningful ring

From there, Maire and Andy started dating long distance, commuting between London and Edinburgh, traveling back and forth on the train line where they first met.

They both coped with the distance in different ways.

“As soon as we were apart, I’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, cool, whatever.’ But Maire would really miss me, but then the longer time went on, I would start to miss her, but she would…not get over me, but wouldn’t miss me as much,” says Andy, laughing.

“There was a bit of a mismatch there, but we would meet up again and, like, bang, everything would be awesome.”

After several months of goodbyes and train journeys up and down the country, Andy managed to transfer to his company’s London office.

Living together “just was really easy, it was really natural,” says Andy.

And about six weeks after he’d moved south, Andy had a revelation.

“Into my head popped the thought: ‘This girl’s amazing. She’s so beautiful, so amazing, so cool. You should marry her.’”

Andy surprised himself with the thought. His parents were divorced. He’d never really thought about marriage. He wasn’t sure he really believed in the concept.

But then he found himself thinking about his paternal grandparents, who’d been happily in love for decades before they passed away.

“When I was born, my granddad bought my grandmother a ring, because I was the first grandchild — this gold ring that she wore. And then when she passed, I got it, and I had it on a chain around my neck,” Andy recalls.

“And when I had this thought to marry Maire, we were in Paddington Station, amongst all the Burger King wrappers or whatever… And so I got my ring off my neck, I got down on one knee, and I said, ‘Will you marry me?’”

Maire, of course, said yes. The couple embraced in the busy train concourse.

“Then we were on the train and we’ve just got engaged, so we’re all cuddly and smoochy and giggly,” says Maire. “And I had a really incredibly strong sense of two people standing next to me.”

Maire looked up, and there was no one there.

She thought about Andy’s grandparents — the ones who’d passed on the ring. She wondered if the sensation she’d felt was the older couple watching over them.

“I said to Andy, ‘I feel like this is for you. I feel like they want you to know that they’re here, this is for you.’”

Then, that night, Maire dreamed that Andy’s grandparents spoke to her, saying: “Welcome to the family.”

“I woke up Andy, and I said to him, ‘I got it all wrong. That wasn’t for you. That was for me.’”

It felt significant. And even more so when, later on, Maire and Andy relayed Maire’s dream to Andy’s mother.

“My mum went white as a sheet,” recalls Andy. “And we were like, ‘What? What?’ And she said when my dad had taken my mum up to Edinburgh to meet his family — and my granddad was this kind of staunch Scottish guy — he’d stood up from his chair and said, ‘Welcome to the family,’ to her — those exact words.”

“I know not everybody believes in that kind of stuff,” says Maire. “But for us, this was a really special moment… And the ring was all about celebrating Andy’s existence. So it’s a real honor to wear it and to look after it.”

Maire and Andy got married a couple of years later in 2003, in Maire’s native New Zealand.

“Maire’s a planner extraordinaire,” says Andy. “She used to be an event coordinator and planner and all of that. I can take absolutely no credit for anything. Maire just completely ran with it and organized this whole wedding in the Marlborough Sounds of New Zealand.”

“I wanted the wedding to be a retreat for everybody. I wanted it to feel quite special and intimate. And so there were only 45 people invited,” says Maire. “We had family traveling from all over New Zealand to attend, and then family from the U.K. and friends from the U.K..”

The wedding party caught the ferry from Wellington down to the Marlborough Sounds and all gathered at a 19th-century building called Furneaux Lodge to celebrate Maire and Andy’s union.

Maire and Andy wrote their own vows. Maire walked down the aisle to a piece of music from the movie “Life is Beautiful” — an Oscar-winning Italian movie they saw together at the cinema not long after they first got together, and which Maire says “really touched us both, and really spoke to us.”

It was the perfect day. Maire and Andy wrote their own vows, recalling their relationship and harking back to that moment in Edinburgh when they went from friends to lovers. Maire took Andy’s name, becoming Maire Bain.

Support, love and friendship

Today, more than two decades since their wedding, Andy and Maire — who took Andy’s name following the wedding, becoming Maire Bain — live together in New Zealand, with two teenage daughters.

They loved becoming parents and raising their children together.

“We really prioritized raising our kids,” says Maire. “One of our big connections is our childhoods and a lot of your values come from what you experienced or didn’t experience as a child, and so Andy and I went into parenting with a very strong sense of the kind of environment that we wanted to raise our kids in.”

But now their daughters are getting older and the couple are enjoying spending time just the two of them again.

This past January, they went to the beautiful Whitsunday Islands in Queensland, Australia.

“We were at a time in our life where we had a lot of things to celebrate,” says Maire. “We were coming up to our 22nd wedding anniversary. Our 25th year of knowing each other. It was my 10 year sober-versary. A whole lot of just good things to celebrate.”

They’re both big believers in signs and “there were so many little things that would remind us of our wedding, or our 25 years together on that trip,” as Andy puts it.

On the last night, Maire and Andy enjoyed a private dinner in their hotel.

“And then, Andy didn’t know it, but I had snuck my wedding dress in my suitcase,” says Maire.

She had the idea of surprising Andy with a hark back to their wedding.

“I’d had a word with the girls at the resort, and I’d said to them, ‘He’s going to walk in by himself. Give him a minute, and then if you could slip this song on, and then I’ll walk in.’”

The chosen track, of course, was the theme from the movie “Life is Beautiful” — the music Maire walked down the aisle to 20 years earlier.

When Andy heard the chords, he couldn’t believe it.

“Our wedding music is on, and she’s not here to hear it. ‘What’s going on?’” recalls Andy.

“And then I looked around to see where she was, and then she was just standing there, in her wedding dress with flowers, just there. And I was just like, ‘Oh, it’s the single most romantic thing that’s ever happened to me.’ It was stunning. It was absolutely amazing. And she looks as beautiful now as she did then. It was just so cool and just so wonderful.”

As they sat there together, wiping away tears, laughing, Andy and Maire found themselves reflecting on the wedding, their life together since and the train meeting that started it all.

Maire and Andy no longer smoke, but Maire jokes that because she met Andy, she’s “so grateful I smoked back then.”

In general, when Maire reflects on her life with Andy, “grateful” is the word she keeps coming back to.

“And supported. I feel really supported,” she reflects. “We’ve learned within our marriage and individually as well, and we’ve supported each other’s individual growth, and that comes from that friendship as well…Our love has grown so strong over the decades. He is the most gorgeous man.”

As for Andy, he says Maire is “still the coolest person I’ve ever met.”

“I love watching her at parties and stuff like that. She’s the kind of person that lights up a room,” he says. “I’m just so grateful to have found her, because I cannot think of anyone better for me than Maire, she’s still my best friend. I still have the best chats with her. She makes me laugh more than anyone else, and the great joy of my life is when I can make her laugh.”

It’s this strong friendship that’s kept the couple solid through life’s ups and downs — because as Andy says, “like all real, true relationships” there have been tougher moments during their 25 years together.

“Through it all, our friendship has been there,” he says.

“And it just feels weirdly fated. There were so many things that could have stopped us meeting… Right person, right place, right time… I just feel like in this really weird way if the universe has got a plan for you, and there’s something there, it’s going to happen.”

Francesca Street, CNN