One family in western Tennessee recently found a message in a bottle that was sent down a river in Kentucky hundreds of miles away. But what really makes the discovery stand out is that the message was sent over 30 years ago.
Pam Stanfield told UPI that her husband, Daniel, and daughter, Skylar Mae, were searching for treasures along Open Lake near Ripley, Tennessee, when they came across what looked like a message in a bottle. Curious, they opened and read the note inside. As it turns out, the message, signed by “John and Trina,” was sent into the Green River in Kentucky on December 21,1990, traveling 250 miles before ending up in the Tennessee lake.
“Most of the time it’s a bunch of trash, but every now and then you get something neat,” Stanfield told the Jackson Sun. “And they got something neat.”
Stanfield posted about the discovery on Facebook, and within an hour she was able to connect with the woman who sent the bottle: Trina Hollander.
“I was getting calls from my son and another friend asking if I’d checked Facebook in the last little while, and I hadn’t because we were with friends on Sunday,” said Hollander. “But he told me I needed to check it, and I couldn’t believe it when I did.”
According to UPI, Trina and her now-husband John had just moved into a house near the shore when they decided to send their note.
“We were out there one day looking at the river and thought it would be really neat to find a bottle with a message on it that washed ashore,” said Hollander. “We never found one, but John said we should send one out, so we did.”
Now, because of the message they sent out over three decades ago, two families have turned from strangers to friends and plan to stay in touch.
A Nova Scotia, Canada, boy recently made a similar discovery in his parents’ back yard. Nyima Mitchell, 8, found a message in a bottle under a tree in Cheticamp.
The bottle had been launched 25 years earlier by a 14-year-old girl visiting the Magdalen Islands with her family. Mitchell’s mother, Britta, said the bottled message had likely been transferred from the ocean to a pond in the family’s yard during a particularly high tide.