A pair of Caringbah friends will make a trip of a lifetime to London to reunite with long-lost family.
Adrienne Waller won the trip as part of the Laing+Simmons Memorable Moments competition, after filling out the form and sharing the post when it showed up in her Facebook feed.
The prize was a $10,000 trip to London and a cup of tea at The Ritz.
But the trip has an ever greater significance for her best friend of 20 years, Heather X, who will re-unite with a family she’s never known.
Heather was adopted at the age of two and left the UK at 15.
She had spent years trying to find her family but recently she tracked down her sister, who told her about another brother and sister who’d been adopted too.
Now, because of her friend’s win there’s a family reunion set for the end of the year.
Ms Waller said she was happy to play a part in helping the family come together.
“I had initially planned to take the Hawaii option but then I thought: I’ve already been to Hawaii. And Heather had recently found out about some other siblings she’d never met in the UK, so I thought let’s go to London instead,” she said.
“I’ve never been to London so Heather can show me around. I have an old girlfriend from school there who I can’t wait to see again.”
She wants to see the big tourist sites including Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London.
She’s also looking forward to seeing her best friend’s journey to meet her family come to fruition.
“This is a tremendously generous prize and I’m so thankful to be able to share it with my best friend of the last 20 years,’’ she said.
‘’It’s not something we would have been able to do otherwise, and we can’t wait.’’