Exactly 29 years ago, on September 26, 1988, an 8 years old Miranda Chavez wrote a message in a bottle and let it float off the coast of sandy shore in Edisto Beach, South Carolina. Most of the kids her age had a penpal and used a post office to deliver their messages, but Miranda decided to go a different route and be somewhat different than her friends.
In an interview with CBS News, Miranda recalls “I remember my mother being really insistent on writing the date on the note for me. I threw it as far as I possibly could. I was afraid I would leave and it would wash back up on shore.” Well as it turns out the bottle didn’t immediately wash up on the shore, it floated away, and it drifted about 90 miles away to Sapelo Island, Georgia. There, during the beach sweep on Saturday Linda Humphries and her husband David, discovered Miranda’s bottle that had a very long journey.
In the Humphries Facebook post, we found out that “We have a current name and city for the now 37 year-old sender, but any phone numbers we’ve found were dead ends,” and as the post goes on they state that “We’ll keep trying.” Thanks to that just hours later they managed to get in touch with Miranda, and they told her that they’d found her old letter. You can imagine the amount of joy that came from Miranda, who has already thought she lost the bottle to the Hurricane Hugo which slammed into South Carolina back in 1989.
Miranda continued her statement saying that “But the moment I looked at it I knew it was mine. Granted, I had forgotten about it. It had been 29 years.” She also explained the reason why the address is nonexistent. Apparently, she moved out of her childhood home as a teenager, and the address where she used to live doesn’t exist anymore. Thanks to the powers of the web and social media these folks got in touch. “Who would have thought? It’s so awesome how something that small — no matter what you’ve got going on in your life — can take you back to your childhood and to some of the absolute happiest times of your life” Chavez stated.
Apparently, it was Miranda’s former classmates who were the ones that found out about the Humphries post, and they instantly tried to reach out to her and inform her about the situation. “I lost contact with all of those people when I moved from that town,” she said, and added, “Not only have I made new friends, like Linda and David, but I’ve also been able to reconnect with people.” Miranda has already planned what to do, and according to what she said the first thing is to go and meet the Humphries and visit the beach where the bottle has been found. According to her “It was meant to be found. It was meant to do something, even if it was just to have people have something positive to say for a few days. I guess it served its purpose.”
