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Unfortunately for those who choose to keep them, garden gnomes aren’t guaranteed a long life. An easy target for drunken revelers, gnome theft is far from uncommon. Intoxicated young people have a tendency to pilfer on their way home. Considering drunk people will steal any useless junk, from traffic cones to ‘For Sale’ signs, garden gnomes are comparatively fancy. Furthermore, these garden knick-knacks are perpetually at the mercy of the weather and often find themselves the unfortunate victims of a mishit football.
Whilst every gnome enthusiast is sure to have their favorites, people don’t tend to become overly attached to their lawn ornaments. After noticing one of her garden gnomes missing, Bev York presumed that they had suffered a similarly unfortunate fate to that of many that came before it. Presuming it was lost forever, the British Columbia resident was stunned to see it not only return, but have a riveting story to accompany it.
It took eight months for the missing gnome to return home, reappearing on the porch with a photo book showing every stage of his wild adventure. The book brought the ornament to life, giving it the name Leopold and giving the gnome’s first-person account of a desire to expand his horizons and experience something aside from rainwater and mud. Leopold’s jaunt saw him visiting some of America’s most famous landmarks, such as the Grand Canyon and Route 66. The lucky gnome even got a taste of what it’s like abroad with a short stay in Mexico, all of which have photo evidence and show little Leopold loving every minute. Bev was so charmed by her gnome’s homecoming and the story that went with it that she posted the story online, which soon garnered a lot of attention and went viral. We could all take a page from Leopold’s book and have a bit more spontaneity in life.
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Surprise Historical Find on Welsh Beach
The last thing anyone anticipates when playing around with a washed-up buoy is that their fun could be potentially fatal. This is the unexpected shock a family from South Wales received when they realized that their children were in fact clambering over an unexploded bomb from WW2. The family, of Burry Port, had decided to go to a beach near Pembrey Country Park for a spot of bodyboarding when they made the remarkable find. After initially seeing the object from afar, curious mum Kelly Gravell approached it for a closer inspection.
Gravell explained how it's not uncommon for oddities to wash up on the beach, and at first glance, the explosive looked almost identical to a buoy. Layers of seaweed and barnacles that clung to the sides made accurately identifying it even harder. Her naturally inquisitive children, daughter Erin, 6, and son Ellis, 4, instantly began to mess around and jump on it. Kelly’s husband even took photos of the kids’ fun and uploaded them online.
The family was totally unaware of the object’s true nature until days after the encounter. A friend notified them of a Facebook post uploaded by Pembley Park that alerted beachgoers to the discovery of an unexploded bomb. Officials were eventually able to identify it as a 70-year-old mine of the U.S military. Mrs. Gravell admits she was shocked by the revelation that their innocent trip could have ended in disaster, adding that she’s never heard of anything like this happening before.
The local council officer said that although it’s common for buoys to wash ashore in the area, it was writing on the side of the bomb that clearly identified it. The incident was eventually resolved by the Royal Navy coast guard who donated the mine in a controlled explosion not long after its discovery.
