The stretch of I-95 that runs through our county takes travelers north and south, even if they don't mean to.
It's wild, the way they drive on that road. I mean, local Maryland drivers are fine, but you add in the Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey ticket catchers, and it's every Volvo for itself out there.
I've never taken 95 all the way to Florida, due to a disdain for mice, but I can only imagine how crazy the traffic is, the nearer one gets to the race tracks and Happiest Place On This Here Earth.
And it's just not the cars that will drive you nuts.
Here's what happened the other day down by Daytona Beach: a 71-year-old woman was cruising 95 with her daughter when a turtle smashed through her windshield. She suffered a cut to her forehead, along with the biggest shock of her life.
The daughter was driving, and here I get to type a sentence I have never even imagined typing. Seeing the turtle smash through the glass and hit her poor mom, she pulled over and received help from a kind motorist.
While the daughter called 911 for help, the operators could hear that man saying “There is a turtle in there!”
To which the daughter, in some shock, replies, “A turtle! An actual turtle?”
I've heard crazier questions.
The unfortunate mom bled profusely, but she was not seriously hurt.
The police figure the turtle ignored the posted TURTLE CROSSING signs and was crossing the interstate (to get to the other side...) when it was hit by another car, sending it airborne.
“I swear to God this lady has the worst luck of anything,” the daughter told the 911 operator as they awaited police and EMS.
2 comments:
Our family moved to Georgia from Baltimore twenty-seven years ago. Still reverberating with culture shock, we made our first pilgrimage back to Baltimore for Christmas in 1994. As we motored up the final leg of the journey -- the BW Parkway -- a large black bird narrowly escaped smashing into our windshield... or so we thought. As we rolled up Charles Street, drinking in the first glimpses of our ancestral home, we noticed pedestrians stopping to stare, open-mouthed, at our Mercury Villager van. Must be the Georgia plates, we thought, a rare sight in Maryland. When we pulled up in front of our hotel, a bellman with an odd look on his face said, "I'll dispose of that for you." "That," we learned, was the bird. It was quite dead, impaled on the front of the roof rack in such a way that its wings lifted in a bizarre display of postmortem aviation each time a breeze caught them. No wonder those children on Charles Street had clutched at Mom's hands as we passed. At the time, I fancied that it was a welcome home from Poe's ghost.
Thank you, Richard, for adding the phrase "postmortem aviation" to my list of favorite expressions!
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