What a great thread __ thanks to Rex for starting it, to Willie-O for reviving it and to Sourdough for making it magical. Here's my 'unexpected' music story.
We were on our way to Hungary as part of a reciprocal arrangement that had brought some Hungarian singers and musicians to Stony Stratford. We were all (about a dozn of us) to meet up in Szombathely, and our contingent was The Bullfrogs plus Roddy Clenaghan, packed into a van, taking it in turns to drive and sleep (with Vicky the fiddler about six months pregnant, but we weren't worried -- we had plenty of gaffa tape and a Swiss Army knife). We've decided to stop somewhere in Germany, find a cheap hotel and get a bath and a decent night's sleep, so we come off the autobahn, take a few wrong turns and end up in a completely different town from the one we'd been headed for. We park the van and head for a late lunch at a nearby bar. We're all sitting outside in the sunshine, and one of our number comes back from the interior and says that it looks like they have music here in the evenings. So we persuade Vicky, who has a bit of the German, to go in and see if we might come back later and play a bit. Yes, no problem they say. So we go off and find a hotel (a bizarre hunting lodge-type scenario, with stuffed animals and little skulls everywhere), have a nap and a shower and head back to the bar in the evening. It's a cellar bar, and they've made space for us at one end, so we sit around session-style and do our stuff, a mix of band material and individual turns, which goes down well as the bar fills up. The beer is flowing and you couldn't put a glass down without it being filled up again. Then out comes a trayful of whiskies (Chivas Regal, no less) and the music goes on. The crowd is pretty knowledgable, and there's one guy who looks like Jerry Garcia's German cousin who's mad about Dick Gaughan, so Roddy's Burns songs go down a treat with him. About ten o'clock the barmaid comes over and says perhaps you'd like to stop for a while and have something to eat, and serves up a free meal! We carry on after that for another hour, more beers, another trayful of whiskies, and at the end of the night the barmaid comes back and says we had a collection and hands over the equivalent of seventy-odd English pounds! It was the most magical night of a great trip -- all the better for being totally unexpected, and we've kept a card from the place for next time we're in the area. In fact Jerry Garcia said that if we get in touch with him he'll fix us up in a few other venues, so we might just make a proper tour of it.
Oh, and two days after we got back to Blighty, Vicky went into premature labour!

BJ