A father and son were strolling down the beaches of Dunkirk, France when they spotted a strange object covered with mussels half-buried in the sand. As the sun set on the English Channel on Monday, nineteen-year-old Elias Saddedine dug out a worn out glass bottle with a crumpled roll of paper inside. He smashed the bottle against a wall to read a message that had travelled almost 6,850 kilometres to reach him and his dad. Half way across the world, in Oakville, just before dawn on Tuesday, Reese Owens was preparing to start her day when she received an unexpected email: “Hello, we found your bottle in the beach of Dunkirk in north of France yesterday,” wrote Saddedine to eight Canadians he didn’t know. “It’s very cool! Have a good day!”Attached to the email was a picture of a wrinkled piece of paper on a wooden table. For a moment, the Canadian mother of two and the French accounting student and his dad, living in two different continents, separated by a vast ocean, were connected by a message she had written two and a half years ago.It wasn’t an SOS to the world. It wasn’t a last will and testament. It wasn’t even a call to action. It was simply an old-fashioned attempt at human connection.She told the recipient this was a message from eight Canadians on vacation on a boat in the British Virgin Islands. She told them that she threw the bottle into the North Atlantic Ocean on April 18, 2015 — the date was written in pencil on a blank line. She asked the recipients to email her, her husband Brian, and the rest of her friends — “tell us where and when the bottle was found.”They had been planning their 11-day “bucket list vacation” since 2013. She had read about people finding messages in a bottle, and thought it was a fun way to commemorate her dream trip. She printed out four of these messages before they left Canada. As they travelled across the Islands, they saved any clea ...
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