You never know where a six-figure jackpot might be tucked away.
Connecticut couple Frank Laquitara and his fiancee, Debbie Long-Combs, were on a trip to Virginia to see family recently when they realized they had a $100,000 winning Powerball ticket tucked in the sun visor of their car.
Long-Combs had received an email stating that a winning Powerball ticket had been sold in Connecticut for the Aug. 24 drawing and decided to check the lottery tickets they had stashed in the sun visor.
"Frank checked the tickets while I read the numbers off of the email — we matched four numbers, plus the Powerball," Long-Combs said in a release by the Connecticut Lottery. "We didn't believe it, even after I repeated the numbers twice and checked the ticket with the Lottery's mobile app.
"And we didn't tell anybody either, just in case we were wrong. We didn't want to jinx it!"
The couple from Preston kept the ticket safe and then went to have it verified after returning home to eastern Connecticut.
"Once we got back to Connecticut, I went to a lottery retailer and scanned the ticket in a ticket checker,'' Laquitara said in the news release. "When it said it was a $100,000 winner, that's when I said, 'It's official. We won!'''
The couple's lucky numbers turned out to be 5, 12, 20, 21, 47 and Powerball 1, with a Power Play number of 2 that doubled the $50,000 prize to a $100,000 jackpot.
Not that there's ever a bad time to win $100,000, but the couple says the win was fortuitous.
"We're very grateful — the timing is impeccable," Long-Combs said. "Frank really needs a new car and we couldn't use our boat all summer because we need a new motor."
The discovery in the sun visor was reminiscent of the lucky find by a Louisiana couple last year. Tina and Harold Ehrenberg were cleaning their home ahead of having family over for Thanksgiving when they discovered a lottery ticket that turned out to be worth $1.8 million.