Three decades after locking eyes with the woman of his dreams, a British man is finally trying to track her down. It was in 1986 that Vernon Burton briefly glanced at a beautiful woman while traveling on a double-decker bus in the New Forest area of southern England. Most people would forget such a fleeting encounter, but Burton never quite managed to put the mystery woman out of his mind and is now looking for her everywhere.
Vernon, aged 62, was born and grew up in Hythe, a small town on the south coast of Kent. He moved to Canada in the 1970s for work but briefly returned to the UK in 1986 for a holiday. He boarded the top deck of a Solent Blue Line bus from Mousehole Lane to Southampton city center, which is when he made eye contact with a woman on the top deck of another bus headed in the opposite direction.
“For some reason I looked back at that other bus and saw a woman looking back at me,” Vernon recalled. “I came over all light-headed, my stomach felt like it had butterflies and my legs started to shake. The buses started to pull away and I just had to reach my hand out to try not to let her go. To my surprise, she did the same.”
“You hear about these things happening in romantic movies – but it really did happen to me,” the retired mechanic added.
Unfortunately, Vernon was in a relationship at the time and couldn’t pursue the matter further. But he’s single now, so he’s back in the UK and he’s trying his best to locate the woman’s whereabouts. He’s sent posters of himself to the bus company, which is now called Blue Star. He’s also asking people to help him in any way they can.
“We received this incredibly romantic request and couldn’t think of a better time of year to help Mr Burton track down this mystery lady,” assistant marketing manager Stacey Tucker told Daily Echo. “It’s a long shot but let’s hope we can bring them together after all these years.”
It’s been thirty years since their very brief encounter, so Vernon doesn’t remember very many details about it, but if you’d like to the man a hand in finding his dream girl, it may help to know that she had long dark hair, wore a dark top and was with two schoolboys in uniform on the day they met.
As Stacey Tucker said, this is a long shot, but miracles can happen. Maybe she remembers him too and seeing his picture she decides to get in touch. Wouldn’t that be something?
