Recently, Hannes Frank was walking along Plage du Pin Sec, near Bordeaux and found a portion of a real estate sign which had washed ashore on the beach. The sign was worn and part of it was ripped away, but “Diane Turton Realtors 732-292-1400″ was still readable. Mr. Frank, a semi-retired software consultant who lives in Brussels, emailed Diane Turton Realtors, in New Jersey, saying “Hi, Just wanted to let you know that I found part of one of your signposts washed up on the beach near Bordeaux France pictures available if wanted. Not in the best shape after that crossing.”

It turns out that when Superstorm Sandy made landfall in October 2012, Diane Turton Realtors had one sign go missing. According to the New York Times, the missing sign was from a house for sale on Cedarcrest Drive, facing a narrow inlet called Debbie’s Creek in the Jersey Shore town of Brielle. The sign was 18 by 24 inches and about an inch thick and made of plastic composite. It disappeared along with the post it was mounted to and was never seen again. Until around May 14, 2018. On a beach in France, 3,595 miles away.

The New York Times contacted Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who studies the drift of floating objects.  He said that judging by how long it took, the voyage of the Diane Turton Realtors sign was likely even more arduous than it seemed: The sign may have been on its third crossing of the Atlantic when it beached.

“There is a great gyre of water that runs from New Jersey to northern Europe down to Spain and back to New Jersey and takes 3.3 years on average, and it takes about a year and a half to drift across the North Atlantic one way from New Jersey to France,” said Mr. Ebbesmeyer, the author of “Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science.”

“So five and a half years is just about right.”

Thanks to Irwin Bryan for contributing to this post.