Kind of an amazing story…

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This has nothing to do with endurance sports, so if that’s what you’re looking for you can stop reading now.

A little more than 2 weeks ago I went up to Michigan for a friends wedding. We made it a long weekend, leaving Chicago on Thursday and driving to the Crystal Mountain resort just south of Traverse City.

The weekend was nice, we went swimming, mountain biking and explored the resort. After all of that we drove back to Chicago on Sunday but decided to make a stop at Warren Dunes State park to play at the beach… That’s where it all went wrong.

We let my son run around in the sand and we took some pictures. My wife asked me to take a picture of her and Sammy. As she handed me the camera, I dusted the sand off my hands on my shorts… And my wedding ring went flying off!

I knew it couldn’t have gone too far, so we searched… and searched… And searched.. No luck

I was pissed. I looked around to see if I could find some weirdo walking around with a metal detector, but I didn’t see anyone.

After 2 hours of searching we gave up and headed home. There was nothing more we could do.

This past saturday I looked online and found a place near my house that would rent me a metal for the weekend for $25 bucks. I had pretty low expectations for finding the ring after 2 weeks of rain and people trampling the dunes. But I figured the worst case scenario is that we spent the day at the beach.

We spent 5 hours in traffic fighting our way back to Warren Dunes. I had a rough I idea of where we were based on a GPS pinpoint I made on my phone the day I lost the ring.

For about an hour and a half I scanned the sand digging anywhere the machine beeped, dealing with hecklers asking “So did ya find anything yet?”

Tracy suggested a place to look, again I scanned over the sand with my metal detector and got a hit. I started scraping away the sand and rechecking to see if the detector was still picking anything up and it was. 

At this point I had dug about 5 inches in the ground, and just as I was about to give up on that spot I felt something. I brushed away some sand and….

I FOUND IT!

I couldn’t believe it. I yelled “YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!!!”

A group of teenage girls sun bathing looked at me like I was from space, but I didn’t care. I really didn’t think that after 2 weeks would find a wedding ring in all of that sand. I figured it was buried and gone forever or someone had found it.

I know this had nothing to do with endurance sports, but I think it’s a really cool story.

One last completely unrelated note. Tomorrow ChicagoNow.com will be changing it’s platform. Which means that if you get email alerts when I post a new blog… you won’t get them anymore. What you can do is bookmark my blog and add it to your RSS feed.

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments section and I’ll try and answer them as best as I can.