Ah. I got really bothered one time as I was slowly passed by a big flatbed hauling chickens. Not by the smell, but I made eye contact with one of the chickens while we were waiting at a traffic light. For some reason, I flashed on the trains the SS used to transport Jews to the extermination camps. It took me about an hour to recover from that.
I always hated driving behind trucks hauling 155 self propelled howitzers because I felt the tube was pointing directly at me.
There was a flatbed loaded with beehives. Albeit it was netted, there were still some loose bees around it. I just tapped the decrease button on the cruise control and let it get ahead of me. I wasn’t in much of a hurry.
The weirdest thing I ever followed was a pair of 7’ tall Rock’em Sock’em robots. I don’t know what else they could have been. One was blue, one was red. There was a place on each on for an operator to stand and several controls.
I got stuck behind a convoy of yachts once. Not boats, yachts. (also not mega-yachts, but big. multiple bedrooms big.) There were at least six of them, and they each took up both lanes. There were various sizes, but the smallest had to be 50’ and the largest about double that.
The weirdest thing was that they were headed west on Route 66 in Virginia. I can’t for the life of me imagine where they might have been headed.
Being in DC, you’d think it would be fairly common, but it’s actually pretty rare; they tend to prefer taking the helicopter, even for relatively short trips (when the President comes to Bethesda where I work it’s only about 8 miles from the White House, and if you get to ignore all traffic and traffic signals, it’s only a 10 minute drive (it would be 30 minutes+ for you or me), but they always take the helicopter). The full motorcade can be up to 50 vehicles, plus local police support, so you can imagine it’s extremely disruptive to the daily goings of the little people. If you get stuck behind that thing, you find out they’re generally not in any big hurry.
Ha! I once followed a trail of chicken carcasses for about 30 miles until I caught up with the chicken truck and a lone chicken clinging desperatley to the front of the cage. There had been about 200 of them strewn every few hundred feet. The rear door flapped open and I felt so bad about that lone survivor I tried to signal the driver but I don’t think he got the point. Poor chicken. I hope he made it.
I don’t know what the hell they were, but they sort of looked like stacks of Lifeguard towers, swimming pool scale. Except they also sort of didn’t. A bit like this, only not.
About 20 years ago, I drove for a local towing company. One evening in the middle of winter, I was dispatched to a rural address about 50 miles out of town with a small F350 flatdeck truck - the kind that would haul a typical 4 door sized sedan.
I arrived to find out that they wanted me to haul a dead horse. The horse had died suddenly and the breeder wanted the body for a postmortem examination.
As mentioned, it was the middle of winter. If the horse wasn’t in full rigor mortice, it was definitely frozen solid.
I hadn’t been told what I was going to be moving ahead of time. I didn’t have a tarp. But it was quite dark and I didn’t want to lose the fee. So I winched the horse up onto the flatdeck tail end toward the truck, strapped it down and drove back into town.
I felt badly for anyone following the truck. They would have had an eyeful of the dead horse’s head, which was better than the view of the ass end I had in my rear view mirror. But not much. There was no mistaking this thing for a wooden horse from a carousel.
In hindsight, should I have obtained a tarp to cover it up? Probably. But $100 is $100. Or whatever it was I made for that job.
I was with a tour group in a bus on a highway in Finland. I was sitting in one of those front seats that look through the front window. The bus crested a small hill, and coming towards us was a flatbed truck bearing a huge wooden barrel, neatly polished and all, with a door in the side. I can only conclude that it was a small sauna, but I don’t know for sure.
I was once stuck behind a farmer driving a tractor that was pulling a cart of fresh manure. It was so fresh, it was steaming. Fortunately, I wasn’t stuck behind him for long.
Speaking of wind-turbine parts, one time we were on Highway 7 coming into the crossroads village of Norwood, Ontario, when we saw …something… ahead of us. It appeared to be a featureless grey rectangle blocking part of my field of vision.
We drove closer and it got larger. Eventually, we got close enough to see that it was a huge grey cylinder, four or five metres in diameter and twenty or thirty long, mounted on wheels at both ends only. It was being pulled through an awkward left turn at the crossroads in the middle of the village.
We had been far enough away that all the wheels, warning lights, the tractor unit pulling it, the escort vehicles, everything, had been momentarily hidden by buildings along the road. All the was visible was the unmarked middle of the cylinder. I believe it was part of the tower for a wind turbine.
That’s one of the few times on the road that I’ve seen something and been unable to process it. I was honestly wondering whether there was something wrong with my eyes.
A semi hauling caskets for the Batesville Casket Co. There was a message on the back doors: "Please drive safely, Heaven can wait.
Living in a rural area as I do, I am frequently behind all manner of livestock on the road. I think the trailer hauling emus was the most surprising. There was a family that raised them about twenty minutes from my house. A high school friend’s mother tried ostrich farming for a while in the 90’s. I still have some of their feathers in a vase.
