America has infinite stories. I was lucky to tell a few.

We were standing in a Sprouts parking lot outside Kansas City, craning over the maps apps on our iPhones, when we settled on What Cheer, Iowa.

It was the second day of a two-week reporting road trip, and Diti, Pat, and I were still unsure of our course. We chose the day’s destination using little more than town names and stray Google searches.

We had been told that this assignment was about serendipity, a word that struck fear into my anxious politics reporter heart. To spend two weeks driving across the country and simply “find good stories” was perhaps something others could do, but I fretted that I’d come home with little more than dirty laundry. My editor would regret sending me; I would be looked down upon, perhaps fired, my life ruined at a minimum. Good stories were not happened upon, I felt sure; they had to be planned.

At first glance, there is little more to What Cheer (pronounced “watch-ear”) than a short stretch of boarded-up buildings. We did not find the charming small-town diner we had anticipated. Instead, we found Dollar General, where 22-year-old Steven Estes was working the cash register, and 71-year-old Walter McKay was buying six Cokes and a bag of ice. We quizzed them about What Cheer, looking for a story that would be surprising.

Our ears perked up when Steven mentioned a recent fund-raiser to restore the aging opera house, a 19th-century building that houses one of the town’s few remaining businesses. Maybe, we thought, this opera house was the story. But how could we possibly capture it? We had just a few hours before we had to leave — what were the chances we’d happen upon the right person at the right time?

We were outside the gas station, quizzing Walter’s brother Earl about the opera house, when our serendipity pulled into the parking lot.

What are you asking me for? Earl said. You know who that is, don’t you?

We soon learned that that was Judy Striegel, the most wonderful Iowa grandmother you could possibly imagine, and a leader of the town’s efforts to restore the old building. She was wearing — serendipity! — a gray T-shirt that read “What Cheer Opera House 1893.”

Did we want to talk about the opera house? Sure, she was free after she dropped off her water bill. Did we want to go inside with her? Did we want to take photos? Would we take up her whole afternoon? Yes, yes, yes.

Four hours later, after a detailed tour of the building and a dusty drive to Striegel’s family farm, we left What Cheer exhilarated. In the car, I considered how improbably lucky we’d been. What absolutely coincidental timing to arrive at the gas station minutes before Judy pulled in. How completely serendipitous that she was wearing her opera house T-shirt, that she had a free afternoon, that she had keys to the building and the eagerness to show it to us.

What if we had picked the wrong Iowa town? If I hadn’t stopped to photograph a silly library sign in Osceola, Iowa, and we’d arrived 10 minutes sooner? If we’d started at the gas station instead of the Dollar General, and Judy had already run her errand and headed home before we ever realized she was the exact person we needed to meet?

Those who know me know it pains me to be earnest, and that most everything I say is wrapped in four to six layers of irony, like wax paper. I am a cynical, type-A planner. How embarrassing to be suddenly starry-eyed, so charmed and hopeful, knowing we had stumbled into a story more perfect than anything we could have planned. But I was.

A few days later, we were in Madison, Wis., hunting for a Big Ten tailgate. We wanted more than frat parties and beer bongs, the cliches you read about anywhere.

It didn’t take long to find our story. It was the same as any other tailgate — a vat of melted cheese in a Badgers-branded crockpot, red and white overalls and class rings, kids tossing a football, and, yes, lots of beer-drinking students — only this was the best tailgate. This was where the families of the players partied. Here, a tight end who had graduated in 1985 was pressing cocktails into my hands; here, Diti was meeting former New England Patriots players; here, Pat was talking us onto the roof of a college party house. We were unknowingly chatting with the woman whose son would score the Badgers’ first touchdown of the game.

Somehow this luck lasted the rest of the trip. On a choppy 6 a.m. ferry across Lake Michigan, we stumbled upon a love story. On a Saturday afternoon in Hersheypark, we met (possibly) the world’s greatest carnival games player, who, but for having friends in town that weekend would not have played and won the three enormous stuffed animals we saw him carrying.

Over the course of our trip, the lesson was obvious and repetitive, as if some higher power considered me particularly thick-skulled. It had never been a question of finding the singular perfect story, I realized; what had mattered was that we were looking. Any tailgate would have been the best tailgate, and any Iowa town would have been the best Iowa town.

Most important, I understand now any Judy would have been the right Judy. This nutty, beautiful country has infinite tailgates, and infinite What Cheers, and infinite Judys — infinite stories to tell, so long as we seek them in humility and good faith.

Infinite stories in the world — how lucky we were to tell these.

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