Maxine Witte lives across the river in Rhineland with her husband Howard. Twenty-one years ago, he was mushroom-hunting. He found a bottle with a note in it.

The bottle had been tossed in the river the year before by Greg Schaefer, a high school kid from St. Louis who was on a field trip in Boonville.

In 1987, she put the newspaper article and the letter in an A&W root beer bottle and then waited for the right opportunity.

"Everytime I would cross the bridge I would look to see if someone was following me so I could throw the bottle. I didn't want to get caught littering! They left a message on my answering machine I had no idea who was calling me."

She forgot that she had thrown the bottle off the bridge, "It took a while for it to all come back to me," Maxine said.

Sure enough, the bottle had been found. "They said it was an A&W root beer bottle with the top rusted so thay had to break it," Maxine said.

Inside they found Maxine's name and number.

"Golly, imagine where that's been: the floods of '93 and '95 with the river up and down. That's pretty funny," Maxine said.

The bottle made it to St. Louis, took a right turn and floated down the Mississippi just south of Cape Girardeau.

The Hermann bridge is the new bridge. The old bridge that Maxine threw the bottle off of was recently demolished.