A beer bottle. Through an open window, meeting my forehead just above the left eyebrow. Hurt like a bitch, and I had to get 28 stitches in my hairline to close it up. Never did find out who threw it.
The Burger Gun must have been misaligned.
(really obscure Almost Live reference there).
The wife and I were driving to MI on I-90 near Michigan City, IN (got that?) I saw a camper by the side of the road about 100 yards ahead with some people milling about. Not too unusual. I just slow down a little and keep my eyes open as we pass it.
The wife was leaning over the back seat ministering to Baby Babe I for something, (bottle, pacifier, bourbon, etc.)
We get close to the camper and the panel truck right in front of me suddenly veers to the right lane. Only then can I see that there is a chair in the middle lane of the highway. It was one of those molded plastic chairs that people have on their patios. The air currents created by the other cars is moving the chair around in circles. It looks almost haunted.
There are cars to the right and left of me. No, veering won’t work.
There’s a car right behind me. No, slamming on the breaks won’t work, not to mention I don’t want the Wife to fly through the winshield into the chair.
All I can do is say “Oh shit. Hold on honey.” Honey just grabs the chairback, with no idea what’s going on.
That thing just EXPLODED. I was probably going about 50 when I hit the thing. White plastic shrapnel went in all directions. The wife said it looked like the wake of a spaceship as it flew past the back of the car.
She did get to see the expression on the face of the driver behind us, though. He didn’t even know what I had hit. All of a sudden the car in front of him was spewing white pieces of something. Could have been metal about to crack his winshield as far as he knew.
When we got to MI, I removed a piece of the leg from the grill of my Exploder (which it cracked, damn.) showed it to everyone, and promptly lost it.
We were coming up to a stoplight near a retirement community when an old man on a tricycle (No, not like Arte Johnson on Laugh-In!) suddenly appeared. My husband slammed on the brakes and we stopped, and the man ran into our left front quarterpanel. No damage to anything, but it scared the bedoobies out of all of us. My husband helped the old man across the street with his bike, and we continued on our way.
I’m always extra-cautious when driving that stretch of road…
One day, I was on my way to work, when out of nowhere I hear a really loud BANG! I looked up, startled, to my rearview mirror to see a bird go spiralling off into the bushes.
A few days later, in the same exact spot, two birds were doing loop-de-loops in the roadway. Both birds hit my car simultaneously, one on each side. Scared the hell out of me!
A week later, same road, different location, I was coming to a stop sign, when a kamikaze bird comes out of nowhere and slams into the front of my car. One wing sticking up over the hood. When I stopped, the wing slid out of my view like a cartoon. I had to laugh.
I, too, once hit a swarm of bees and it’s the most gross thing I’ve ever seen. No amount of wiper fluid would get those corpses off my windshield!
Once, on my way to my brother’s in Janesville, something hit my car and scared me to death. I checked when I got to his house, and there was a hole in my car about the size of a bb, just inches from my open window. I can only figure the truck that passed me shot a bb at me! If the timing had been different, I would have been shot in the neck! :eek:
Three raccoons, on several different occassions, decided it would be fun to run under my tires as I drove by. I hate that sickenging thud as they hit the undercarriage! ::shudder::
An orange vest, of the sort worn by highway workers to increase their visibility. A worker must have laid it by the side of the road. The car in front of me ran it over, kicking it up into the air so that it landed perfectly on my car’s antenna, where it flapped in the breeze like some deranged fluorescent flag. I had to pull over and remove it so the antenna wouldn’t break from the stress.
I was driving home one night, on the interstate, and a whole wheel, tire and everything, rolled out onto the road right in front of me. I buried the brake pedal… SKKRREEEEEEEEEEEEEE!! but it wasn’t enough. WHUD! Good thing there wasn’t anyone behind me. Fortunatly, damage to my car was essentially non-existant. Scrape on the bumper is all. The wheel, amusingly enough, was fine. A very embarassed guy came to reclaim his spare tire he’d been changing by the side of the (sloped) road. ;]
I’ve also been hit in the chest by a bird while on my motorcycle. Luckily, it was a small bird, and I had my good thick biker leather jacket on. But I still had a slight bruise there. Just about anything hurts when you hit it at 75 MPH.
-Ben
baby bottle nipple
Well, sort of. Was in a real bad part of town, parked at a stop sign, waiting to cross the street when a hooker walked in front of my truck, which I had all but welded shut. You know, doors locked, windows tightly up, A/C on, that kind of thing. She ‘offered’ herself to me, which, because she was built like dynamight, was tempting, but I shook my head no, and at my refusal, she set a baby bottle nipple down in the center of my hood and walked off. I was not going out to remove it in that area and it took me a couple of blocks to shake it off!!
Don’t know if this counts, but I got hit in the lens of my motorcycle helmet by a lightning bug late one night on I-80. I’d only been riding a month or so, and seeing an unidentified glowing something headed straight for my eyes sure spooked me. And, of course, it continued to glow for a bit on the lens.
Made it a lot easier to decide to always wear a full-face helmet, though.
A seagull hit ME. In the middle of the Oakland, Ca Chinatown, right by the Salvation Army Store. I was going all of 15 mph, when the freaking thing plowed full tilt into the SIDE of my car, WHAM. The only thing I could figure is it had lost lift due to some weird air eddy as it was coming around the corner of a building and couldn’t adjust its height in time. Freaked me the hell out and made me jerk reflexively - If there had been a car in the lane next to me, I would have crashed for sure. Didn’t see what happened to the poor bird. I was around the corner and into the tube to Alameda, just grateful to get out of there.
- Tamerlane
Well, I haven’t been hit by anything more remarkable than gravel and odd little car parts, but there’s someone out there who can attest to being hit by a disposed diaper.
Back in the summer of 1970, my parents took the middle bench out of their VW van, put down a pile of quilts and pillows, and drove me and my 1-year old sister from Rome, GA to Boston, MA on a vacation.
I don’t remember exactly what, but I fed my little sister something that disagreed with her, and she soiled her diaper with some especially rancid and runny poo. This being the days of cloth diapers, it made the interior of the van unbearable. There was no way Mom was going to try and salvage that particular diaper, so she just rolled down the window of the van and tossed it out onto I-95.
Except it didn’t hit the road. It splattered on the windshield of a car behind us. Mom was mortified!
So, if you were hit by an especially stinky diaper on the northbound side of I-95 in the summer of 1970, my Mom apologises!
This may not qualify as in the hit-by category, but…
It happened to my brother, he was driving on a bridge and suddenly a loose tire passes him a great speed. He was amused and jokingly told his friend, “wow, look at that, an idiot lost a tire”. He slowed down and CLUNK! the car tilted to one side. Still makes me laugh.
I did not get the license number or anything I was just trying to get over to the shoulder after it happened. This was before I had my cell phone so I couldn’t call ahead for the state patrol. One guy stopped to see if we were all right but he didn’t have a cell phone either. I never found out if the truck driver eventually lost the anchor or what.
As for the insurance they paid, but the deductable was a good part of it. Claims adjuster gave us no problem. I got the impression that it was so weird it had to be true so they didn’t fight it.
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About 700 bajillion pink permanent hair wrapping papers. Okay, maybe I exaggerate but there was a hellacious amount of them on the 5 Freeway south of San Clemente about 25 years ago. Never saw the spill, only the aftermath. I was driving through an alien pink landscape.
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Bird ID at 50 mph. A colleague and I were driving along when a bird darted out and hit the front of my car. As it flipped past the windshield, we both saw the russet undertail coverts and shouted “Catbird!” at the same time. Yuck.
I had a deer hit me. It ran into the passenger side door. and once an orange hit the front grill of the minivan. About five or six years ago on I-45 on the way to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo someone out there was hit with my sons stetson. I told the boy not to wave it out the window. (Nope we didn’t replace it and he’s never had another.)