A Massachusetts woman has found a bike she originally lost 42 years ago, when she was just 11 years old.
Lisa Brown probably wasn’t expecting to see her beloved pink banana seat bike again, after she fell from a rickety bridge over a muddy stream in Wellfleet, Massachusetts in 1970 .
Speaking to the Cape Cod Times, Brown described how the bike sank “way, way into the mud” when she toppled into the stream. Young Lisa’s attempts to retrieve her trusty pink steed were in vain, and she departed the water “smelling like a snapping turtle.”
Yet now, against all the odds, the bike has been found. And, of all people, it was Lisa’s own wife, Deidre Olinger, who spotted the missing bicycle.
Olinger was strolling by the stream this month when she spied a rusted frame tangled in the undergrowth, roughly 400 metres from the bridge. She told her spouse about the sighting, and the pair went back to take a look together.
As soon as she saw it up close, Brown was tipped off by the banana seat that had clung to the bike through its ordeal; somehow, over 42 years, her bike had moved from the stream’s muddy bed to a patch of undergrowth almost half a kilometer away. Lisa described the discovery as like “finding a long lost friend.”
Admittedly, this long lost friend is somewhat worse for wear nowadays, and is unlikely to be crossing any more rickety bridges. Which is why Lisa is planning to display the rusted remains in her home. Here’s a short video report on this most unexpected of finds: