Last week I blogged about our experience at the Headwaters of the Mississippi River while on vacation. Little did I know when I posted that picture of the father pulling his disabled son across the Mississippi that it would get the attention that it did.

A lot has happened since that post on my social media sites last weekend. It exploded or as some would say that it went viral. For some reason that picture resonated with people. I have shared pictures before on my Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and X formally known as Twitter and my WordPress blog site that have received a lot of likes, or shares, but nothing like what happened with this post.

I posted the picture on Saturday, Aug 24th, on most of my social media platforms. Almost immediately people were commenting and sharing the post. Sunday I received a message from a tv journalist from WCCO television in Minneapolis thanking me for the post and was wondering if she could get the contact information about the father in the picture and do a story on them. I told her I didn’t know him or his family, they were complete strangers to me.

That all changed on Tuesday, because of all the shares it was getting, the grandmother of the boy saw it and messaged me on Facebook thanking me for the post and the wonderful blog that I wrote and posted on Sunday. I was shocked. I then got the names of the father, mother and son. I now knew who they were. The next day the mother messaged me and thanked me and we chatted back and forth a bit. She gave me her husband’s cell phone number to pass on to the journalist at WCCO TV giving me permission for her to contact them. I thought that was awesome. For some reason I felt like I knew them and we were friends. That is the power social media has. We were complete strangers enjoying our vacations and within a few days were connected through a picture I took and shared.

The numbers as of this writing are amazing to me. On Facebook alone, 118,142 Impressions, that’s the number of times your content was on someone’s screen. 2,506 Reactions, that’s the number of times someone shared a like, love or wow. 128 shares, people who liked the post enough to share it on their page. My blog numbers from last Sunday are similar.

I want to thank anyone who commented or liked or shared my post about a father that wanted his son to experience what others have done, walking across the headwaters of the Mississippi.