Ever had your bike stolen? It’s a horrible feeling… you could have sworn you locked it up at the empty bike rack your staring at with a confused expression when suddenly the harsh reality dawns on you… “I’ve been robbed!”
But for one lucky lady, she was miraculously able to locate her stolen bike nearly 50 years later from the most unlikely place ever –the middle of a tree.
99-year-old Helen Puz from Washington in the US was given a gift of a girls bike more than 50 years ago because she had recently been widowed and had lent it to her eight-year-old son Don to play with when it went missing.
And in typical eight-year-old boy style, Don conveniently “lost” the girls bike, presumably because he was embarrassed to cycle it when in actual fact he had abandoned it behind a local restaurant.
Almost forty years later Helen read a local newspaper article about a bike that was stuck five feet off the ground in a tree behind the same restaurant her son used to play near and was intrigued to see if it was the same bike and it was! Amazingly the tree had grown around the bike propelling it upwards.
When Helen and her son Don went to visit the bike, they discovered that the bike was still perfectly intact and even the front wheel still worked!
The bike tree is now a local landmark and attracts hundreds of visitors a year and a Japanese company have even made a documentary about it.
We love a happy ending!
