Pensioner's lost parked car found after a week by hero stranger waiting for takeaway pizza

A pensioner who couldn’t find where he parked his car a week ago has thanked the complete stranger who answered his appeal to help find it.

When Anthony Holliday appealed to Bristol Live readers to help find his car, his hero appeared not with a cape, but with a takeaway pizza.

Gari Alongi saw Mr Holliday’s appeal, and on Tuesday evening, when he was told his wait for a takeaway pizza from the legendary Grecian takeaway restaurant in Gloucester Road would be 25 minutes, realised that his time to be a hero had come.

Mr Holliday had lost his car last Wednesday when he parked it in the residential streets of Kingsdown to go to an appointment at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

After a medical procedure, doctors told the 73-year-old he wouldn’t be able to drive back home to Bridgwater in Somerset, so the pensioner got a taxi instead, with the intention of coming back the next day to retrieve his car.

But when he did that, and in subsequent trips to Bristol, he couldn’t find it in the streets of Kingsdown where he thought he’d parked it.

His son Liam appealed on social media and then Anthony himself told Bristol Live where he thought the car was - off Horfield Road in Kingsdown, near the university.

But it appears that in the search for a parking space and the rush to make his hospital appointment, Mr Holliday ended up parking a lot further out than he thought.

For when our hero of the hour went looking, he found the car in Archfield Road, Cotham.

“I saw the appeal, and thought ‘I’m going down that way to get a pizza later’,” said Mr Alonig, who runs his own business in Bradley Stoke.

“When they said the pizza would be 25 minutes, I thought I may as well have a look. I got back in my car, drove up the hill off Gloucester Road and I found the car on about the sixth street I drove down. It was a lot further away from the hospital than I think he realised.

“The roads around there all look the same and the road layout is disorientating, I can see how this happened,” he added.

“I took a picture of it and sent it to Liam, and he was quite emotional.

“Amazingly, considering it had been there a week on a street with parking meters, it didn’t have any parking tickets and wasn’t clamped, just very steamed up windows,” he added.

Mr Alongi returned to the street to help guide Mr Holliday back to his car when, on Wednesday, he made another trip on the bus up from Bridgwater to collect his car, more than a week after he first parked it.

"I am just so deeply grateful," said Mr Holliday.

"I thanked him profusely. It was a lot further away than I thought it was, but everything is great now," he added.

Source https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/pensioners-lost-parked-car-found-3437472