A love-struck 11-year-old paid a taxi driver £827 to take her 800 miles to meet a boy she'd been chatting to online.
Alexis Waller, from Arkansas, US, gave her parents the fright of their lives when she disappeared in the middle of the night with $10,000 she'd stolen from her grandmother's sock drawer.
Alexis planned to meet up with a 16-year-old boy she'd met a couple of years ago while on holiday, and had been keeping in touch with online.
The only hitch? He lived 800 miles away in Florida.
Proving no distance seems insurmountable to a preteen in love, Alexis hitched a ride with a stranger to a petrol station 20 miles away from her home, where she phoned for a taxi.
When Alexis asked the taxi driver to take her on the 800 mile trip, he apparently didn't have any concerns about an 11-year-old embarking on such a long trip by herself - as long as she could pay.
"He didn't really ask anything, he just asked me where I needed to go," Alexis told local news site KARK.
"I said 'I need to go to Jacksonville, Florida'. He's like: 'Do you have money?' And I'm like 'yes'."
Alexis paid $1,300 (£827) up front and said she would give the rest of the money when they arrived.
When Alexis's parents realised she'd left the house, they thought she might have been kidnapped and called the police to report her missing.
Officers traced Alexis's call to the cab company and contacted the driver, who stopped his car in Atlanta, Georgia, so her parents could make the nine hour drive to pick her up.
"I'm actually glad I got found. I knew I made a mistake after a while," said Alexis.
Speaking about his relief that his daughter had been found safe and well, Alexis's dad Brent said: "You have the rest of your life to punish her, and you just want to hug her and just love her because you got her back and that's what's important."
We wouldn't want to be in Alexis's shoes when the relief wears off!