Strange things in the road

[Southron]

About 2 years ago I was driving thru S Florida thru the everglades and saw an Aligator's tail lying by the wayside... just the tail! The whole thing looked to be at least5 or 6-foot long!

[silvan]

It's a tie for me. On the one hand, I was coming up through Wytheville one night when a flatbed had lost part of a load of angle iron alllll over the road. I got slowed down some, but there was nowhere to go without running over some of it. I pulled off on the shoulder with dozens of other vehicles, and the only thing wrong with my truck was there was no longer a set of steps going up the side of the fuel tank. No punctured tires, amazingly enough.

The other one, I was coming up I-81 some way or other when this pickup truck with a load of stuff piled way up high on the bed merged on in front of me. He had this big metal shelving unit on top of everything, and it wasn't strapped down at all. I guess he figured it would ride, and he figured wrong. About as soon as he got up to speed, that shelf came off, and it kept sliding forward at 65 mph, losing speed slowly. I moved left to avoid it, and it moved into my lane. I ended up kissing the gravels off the side of the left shoulder avoiding that thing, but I didn't hit it. It's pretty amusing to think back on that little dance, and how moving left was the wrong thing to do in that particular situation, but there's no way I could have guessed which way that stupid shelf was going to track when it hit the road.

[VPIDarkAngel]

This one happened on Friday evening when NC and VA were getting some high winds. I was heading north on US-29 near Reidsville, NC and I noticed something amiss on the southbound side as a Celadon truck approached. A 100' pine tree was leaning over the road, and the top 10' or so had snapped off, falling down as the Celadon truck neared it. It shattered the windshield and the severed tree section bounced into the hammer lane. Thankfully, the driver escaped unscathed. I'm sure the folks heading south who didn't have CB's were rather shocked to see that tree in the road [without the trunk attached].