I was driving to college today just casualling listening to my Alanis (OK I was singing along as well) when through the air vent I get this whiff of something pretty funky. But it wasn’t that bad and living out in the country if you’re not used to some strange smells then what the hell are you doing out here? Anyway, so I finally get to college, park up as usual and open my door to step out.
:eek:
Never again will I be able to open my door without some sense of impending doom. The smell just hit me like a sack of bricks and it was nasty. I don’t know if it was trash day or something but it didn’t even smell like trash. It smelt like someone had bought 5 dozen eggs and tried to do a “Cool Hand Luke”, then having completed their mission placed their butt upon my nose and let a mighty one rip! The worst thing was that it didn’t just smell like rotten eggs. It smelt like… gravy.
I mean gravy? How can gravy smell that bad? The entire college site stank of the stuff. Oh man am I glad to be home. :smells air: Ahhhhhhh.
On the rare occasion, when the wind is right (wrong?) and I’m in a particular area of towns out in the burbs, I smell something that to me smells like fast-food restaurant deep fryers. My husband has a far better sense of smell than the average person, and assures me that although he understands the confusion, that’s the scent of a sewage treatment facility from afar. (I’ve smelled one up close, and they aren’t similar.)
However, I’d say that competing for worst “smells carried on the breeze”*, it’s pretty much a tossup between rotting pea vines and pig manure. Bleah!
*I.e., something you might smell when out driving around or otherwise minding your own business, instead of opening up that forgotten plastic container in your fridge, disturbing a rotting carcass, that sort of thing.
Ah yes, the joys of rural driving. I live in a rural rural rural area. Sometimes, especially at night, comes the daintily wafting aroma of skunk (or as we are wont to say round these parts polecat)! Nice spring night, windows rolled down enjoying the softness of a spring breeze, then, outta nowhere… polecat! I’m here to tell ya that is one of the most ungodly stenches known to the world!
I usually arrive at my college campus before 7 a.m. The parking lot is directly across from the horse/cattle fields. Ahhhhh, nothing like the stench of manure in the morning!
Also, sometimes the breakfast smells from the dormitory dining hall drift over. You’d think this was a good thing, to combat the manure. Alas, the smells from that kitchen can only be described as something akin to toxic chemical radioactive maple syrup. When I smell the stuff, I can almost picture it as being used as motor oil for the campus farm tractor. Makes me lose my appetite for pancakes, I tell ya!
I’m guessing that there are gingko trees planted on the campus. In the spring, the females (IIRC) produce a really foul smelling fruit. It sounds (and smells) as if some a landscaper installed the wrong sex when the landscaping was done.
At home, Mountain Ash (? we called them bird berry trees!) trees produce lovely little white blossoms before their orange berries. They smell, to me, like rotting fish.
I dunno swampbear, I live in a semi-rural area about a mile away from a Pig Farm. We also get skunks in our alley, and I’ll tell ya, I’ll take skunk over Pig Farm any day of the week. Thank Og we only have to deal with Pig Farm smell when the wind is blowing JUUUUUUUST the wrong way.
CurrentDog, who will roll in every vile-smelling thing Known To Man, has been known to refuse to go outside when there’s really strong Pig Farm Smell. It’s enough to make your eyes bleed, and your nose to refuse to work anymore.
There’s another one for my Southern-to-English dictionary.
I thought a polecat was something like a lynx/bobcat or something. Some bizarre mysterious wild cat that you just cant adopt from a shelter, who lives in the South.
Another battle against ignorance won. You may now resume your discussion of stinky odors encountered while driving.
Downtown Milwaukee often has an unpleasant burnt organic matter smell that turns my stomach. I’ve never been able to determine what it is but it increases my hatred of this town another notch.
DogMom I believe ya about pig farm smells. I remember a little trip to Northwest Iowa during the height of hog season. :eek:
Guess I’m just lucky cause all I have to deal with is polecat then.
Dogzilla just call on me for any of your southern to english needs. BTW, howdy neighbor! I’m about a hundred miles north of ya.
[Gomez Addams] Plnnr! you spoke French! Speak some more! C’est la vie! Coup D’Etat! Voulez Vous! [/Gomez Addams] With the accompanying kissing up and down the arm of course.
We have those white blossom flowers here as well. A friend of mine lives at the bottom of a court, and her entire street leading into the court is just lined with these trees. When the wind is blowing that way, OH. MY. GOD. It STANKES. I think its got like a rotten fish type of smell.
It’s not the nastiest smell, when smelled from afar, but for sheer distance I’d have to vote for pulp-processing stank. I’m not sure where the nearest pulp-processing plant is to Orlando, but the closest one I know of is in the I-10 corridor, roundabout 200 miles away. And when we get a cold front in winter and the breeze pushes in from the North, wouldn’t you know that about 1/10 of the time the air smells like, well, like Jacksonville.
My junior high school — a rural facility, in keeping with the thread thus far — was (and is) located next to a major mushroom-growing operation.
You know what mushrooms grow in, right?
So did we, every stinking day from March to the end of the school year when the stinking wind was right. Or wrong, depending on your point of stinking view.
After a couple of days of that, one begins fantasizing about the improvement that would be achieved by replacing the farm with a pile of burning skunks.
I live in a small town surrounded by dairy farms and feed lots. Occasionally you catch a faint whiff of eau d’exhaust bovíne. When the atmospheric conditions are ideal (a relative term) you will occasionally get a very strong dose of this “aroma”.
Once when I had been living here a short time, I was actually awakened from a sound sleep by the concentrated fumes of bovine effluvia. It seems that the wind had shifted just so, and, like everyone else around here in the summertime, I had left my swamp cooler* on overnight. It filled the house with this foul miasma. You could almost feel it on your skin. It was so thick in the air that breathing through your mouth was not an option – you could taste it!
Say it with me now:**EEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwww!
**
My dilemma was that there was no way to clear the air. If I turned off the fan, the stuff would just linger like an invisible, incontinent steak-in-waiting. My only hope was to leave the fan on and pray that the wind would eventually shift so the fan could start drawing in fresh air, instead.
–SSgtBaloo
*Swamp cooler: [swǒmp cūlǝr] n. Slang. A device used instead of air conditioning in dry climates. It cools by drawing air forcefully through a wet pad and blowing the (evaporatively cooled) air into the area to be cooled.
Ahh! Downtown Milwaukee! If it’s not Miller brewing up another batch, it’s the lovely smell of the industrial valley. And on the really good days, it’s both. Yep, plop me down on 16th and Wisconsin blindfolded and I’d know it just by the smell.
You don’t happen to be a student at Marquette, do you, jnglmassiv? That’s where I learned to love it.
Snicks
I’ll see your pig farms, and raise you a dozen chicken farms. Seems like just about every egg sold in Southern California comes from chicken farms in my town. Endless rows of laying sheds, as far as the eye can see (because they are watering so hard, this isn’t very far.) You know how they dispose of tons of chicken poop? By stirring it with water into a slurry, then spraying it onto fields to dry. The stench from this operation has been known to stun an ox at 3.4 miles. The true topper was that in one canyon outside of town was a feed lot. When the wind blew just right, Eau de Boeff mixed with Parfum du Poule for a nasal extravaganza that cannot be beat!
