This is too cool for words.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business ... 3970.story
Scott Powers | Sentinel Staff Writer
April 22, 2008
It had been a wonderful vacation at Walt Disney World -- until Paul Campanale accidentally threw away his wife's three platinum and diamond rings.
An icy-cold trip home to Worcester, Mass., awaited the unfortunate husband as he, his wife and two young children left the giant resort Friday.
"We weren't speaking," Karen Campanale said Monday. "At least, I wasn't speaking to him."
But into every nine-year marriage, a little magic must fall: Beating what the Campanales had been told were the all-but-impossible odds of finding the three rings required one lucky break and eight Disney workers in protective gear pawing through a trash pile bag by bag.
"We were on our way to the airport when my husband had gotten the phone call saying they were recovered," Karen Campanale said.
The night before the family's departure from Disney, Karen Campanale, 35, a teacher, had taken off her engagement, wedding and five-year-anniversary rings, as was her habit. She put them in a little container and then placed that, for safekeeping, in a cardboard bowl on a shelf in their villa at Disney's Wilderness Lodge.
As they packed and tidied the villa, Paul Campanale, 37, a chemist, didn't notice the container had rings in it, so he tossed the bowl and its contents.
Housekeeping collected the trash and it was sent, the Campanales were later told, to the resort's industrial-sized trash compactor.
"The man said: 'If it's already in there, I don't know what else I can do for you. Sorry,' " Karen Campanale recalled.
So the Campanales chucked their hope, checked their bags, gathered their children -- Jack, 6, and Emma, 3 -- and awaited their Magical Express bus to start the long trip home.
But it turned out the trash from their villa hadn't reached the compactor yet. Instead, it had taken another route and had been dumped in a standard parking-lot trash bin.
When Wilderness Lodge executive housekeeper Drew Weaver realized that, he organized a search party -- himself and seven other volunteers among the employees. They donned gloves and other protective clothing, emptied the bin onto the asphalt and began to search, one bag at a time, for the three rings.
The Campanales had no idea this was happening. Shortly after their bus left Wilderness Lodge for the airport -- maybe three hours after they first reported the loss -- Paul Campanale's cell phone rang, bringing news he could hardly believe: rings found. Weaver drove them over to the bus' next stop, Disney's Polynesian Resort.
"A lot of people around the hotel heard about what happened, and they were congratulating us and saying, 'Wow, you guys are heroes.' We're not heroes. That's what we do," Weaver said. "That's not the first time we've gone through trash -- oh, no. We don't always find things. Many times we come up empty. But we didn't this time."
The three rings, Karen Campanale said, are fine.
"I was shocked," she said. "That's five-star service."