Her truck was stolen 2 years ago. She found it thanks to pure chance — and a patch of nail polish
CBC
Would you recognize your lost vehicle two years after it was stolen?
For Laura Zimmerman, it was easy — all she needed was to look for a spot of green nail polish she had painted on the fuel cap of her Ford F-150.
Zimmerman, from Williams Lake, B.C., said she never fully gave up hope of finding her stolen dark green truck, but she was shocked to see a vehicle that looked a lot like it driving down Highway 97 a couple of weeks ago.
She followed the truck to 100 Mile House, where it stopped and she had the opportunity to verify the mark she left behind many years ago.
"It's just so surreal to me," Zimmerman said, describing the moment she realized it was her truck from the small patch of nail polish.
"It's very, very festive — you could even use it for a holiday manicure," she told host Sarah Penton on CBC's Radio West about the paint, describing the colour.
Zimmerman and her husband, Jim, relocated from Saskatchewan to British Columbia with the truck nine years ago.
The last time she saw the vehicle, at their home on Fox Mountain in Williams Lake, was on the early morning of Jan. 16, 2020, after she left the keys in the car ashtray the night before.
She says they immediately reported the car loss to RCMP.
"I had a hard time believing it at first — it wasn't really a high-end vehicle, like a 15-year-old vehicle with a lot of kilometres on it," Jim Zimmerman said.
The couple bought a replacement truck, but Zimmerman says her emotional attachment to the old vehicle was so strong that she held out hope that it would be recovered someday.
On Nov. 24, her hopes finally came true by pure coincidence. She was on her way home from a medical appointment in Kamloops, and if she hadn't pulled out from Highway 97 near 70 Mile House in order to answer her daughter's phone call, she wouldn't have spotted the Ford when she returned to the road.
Zimmerman says besides the green nail polish painted on the gas cap, another identifying feature was a decal for Cam-Don Motors, a dealership in Perdue, Sask.
She says she called the police after parking just across from the truck in 100 Mile House.
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