Wellfleet, Massachusetts resident Lisa Brown was eleven years old when she last rode her bike. While peddling on the rickety bridge at the Herring River in 1970, she lost control and fell into the muddy banks. She emerged dirty, and wet, “smelling like a snapping turtle”, but the bike was nowhere to be found.

Forty-two years later, the bike was almost all but forgotten when Brown’s wife, Deirdre Olinger, went trekking at the Herring River this past spring. About a quarter mile from the bridge where Brown had tumbled as a child, Olinger noticed something twisted and metallic in the undergrowth. As she got closer, she realized it was a bike. Sure enough, it was the very bike her wife had owned as a little girl.

The banana seat gave it away as Brown’s childhood bike. She tells the Cape Cod Times, “it was like finding a long lost friend.”

Woman Finds Lost Bike 42 Years Later