OT: Talking Cars Tuesday - Weird Stuff

My then-fiancée and I were driving up to Maine from Cleveland a few years back. We were about three hours into the trip (on I-86 E in southern NY) and we hit a deer. I was able to swerve enough to just ping the deer with my driver's side headlight and bumper and it went spinning off the driver side of my car. Luckily the car wasn't too damaged and we were miraculously able to make it to Vermont that night, get the bumper/fender tightened up and enjoy the rest of our vacation.

The weirdest part to me was driving into a gas station immediately after the accident to further assess the damage and calm down for a minute. I got out and saw that the deer had shit ALL DOWN the driver's side of the car. One long poop streak. I started scrubbing with a squeegee and a guy walked up and said, "Deer?" "Yep, crapped all over my car," I said. "Yeah. They'll do that" he replied. I had no idea this was common knowledge before that. It at least made me laugh as I scrubbed deer shit off my car in the middle of nowhere.

so I could tell plenty of weird stories.  However, sticking with ones that involved me, I was on a test drive once and the truck a customer was driving was low on fuel, so I rode with him to the gas station.  We pulled into the gas station and he drove striaght into one of those cement barriers that protects the tanks.  

He bought the truck.

"

• In your car?
• To you in a car?"

is there an R rating limit on this? I mean, hatter comments here alot... ;-)

My POS mid-80's Ford Escort had its share of "features".   I was passing a car on a remote 2-lane stretch in the U.P. between Manistique and Engadine on my way back to Ann Arbor.  I depressed the gas pedal to get a running start and started to pass.  I had built up enough momentum to get even with the car, then the gas pedal flopped to the floor.  No response.   Luckily no traffic behind me as I edged back to my lane and rolled to a stop.  

I'm not a car junkie, but a little chain that connected the gas pedal to, well, the engine had disengaged.  This happened numerous times in the future, usually while accelerating fairly rapidly.   I broke out in a cold sweat every time I drove over the Mackinac Bridge.  I had visions of getting stranded in the left lane over the grating, then watching my urine drip slowly down hundreds of feet as I pissed my pants while reattaching this stupid little gas pedal chain mechanism.

 

I got thrown across the hood of my 1973 Dodge Polara one time when I was in high school (in the early 90's). I'm from a small town outside Columbus and thought it would be a good idea to try to buy beer at a carryout on the near east side because they supposedly didn't card. Let's just say the trip did not go as planned.

Was driving the '91 454 SS my dad and I co-owned when I was 15.  I was coming back into my small town where the highway has about a 25-30 degree curve to the left.  The massive serpentine belt that ran, among other things, the power steering pump.  The combination of shock and complete lack of upper body strength nearly put that truck into the safety railing.  Luckily my dad was able to lunge across the truck and get the wheel turned.

Back in 1995 I was living in the UK.  I was driving toward Merthyr Tydfil on the A465 in the Brecon Beacons.  I hit a patch of black ice and the car started spinning.  The Brecon Beacons are hills there and had steep drop offs on either side of the road.  With the car spinning I go accross the median and accross the on-coming traffic lanes in the direction of 2 O'clock (driving on the left side over there) not hitting anything.  The car slid up a guard rail where the guard rail was anchored to the ground and came to a stop.  I got out of the car and looked around.  If I had gone any other direction the car would have gone down the steep drop off.  If I had hit any oncoming cars the wreck would have been horrific.  I managed to back the car off guard rail and contined on my way.  I'll always believe I dodged the grim reaper that night.

2006 and I'm driving east on I-70 between Breezewood, PA and Hagerstown, MD.  A deer darts from the right side of the road and hits my van.  I hear the thump and pull over.  Just my passenger side fender is dented, but there is blood on fender and bits of fur and blood stuck to the radio antenna.  I see the deer in the road and go back to move his body off the road as I don't want somebody to have an accident hitting it.  I get back to the deer and the deer has no head.  I look around and I don't see the head.  I figure the deer was decapitated by the van's radio antenna.  

My friends thought it was hilarious to put wildlife in each other's vehicles. It started when one of us caught a small bird and put it in someone's car. The thing sat perched on his dash as he drove away and he never noticed until he got a half mile down the road. Then another guy put a 20" salmon he had caught up under the spare tire of another guys truck, which was only eventually found by smell. In retaliation, he put a 25lb live snapping turtle in the other guy's toolbox, which he found while he was pumping gas and almost lost a finger.

This didn't happen to me but I wish it had. I went to high school in Dallas and Texas-OU weekend was the biggest party weekend of the year. One of my friend's brothers went to OU, and had a big party, with lots of people from both sides there. The cops eventually came and broke it up. Two of my girlfriends left in their car. When they were about a block away and at a stop light, two naked OU guys jumped in the back of their car (this is back when you had to manually push down each button to lock the doors so no one's back doors were ever locked). I don't why they were naked, but they had run from the party when the cops came and had no where to go. My friends drove them around for a while, then dropped them off somewhere. No harm, no foul, just a great story for a couple of high school girls. 

that was so rusted out on the bottom that you could see the pavement through the floor.

Had just sold my 1969 Camaro to get it--this was around 1982.  Coming back from work late and was crossing Woodward (called Wide Track in Pontiac, where I was) and I t-boned a car headed the wrong way on Woodward.

I told my story to the Mi State Trooper and when he asked the driver of the other car which way she was headed down Woodward, she pointed in the direction opposite the flow of traffic.  

"Ma'm, are you aware this boulevard is one-way and you were headed in the wrong direction?"

A: "Oh, really?   I wondered why the stoplights were all turned around the wrong way!"

 

True story.

Lost my VCard in my first car. Top that.

I've had two first dates where I ended up in a ditch because of snow. One I was in high school and I just was driving too fast. The second team was with my now wife so I can't complain about that. It's a great joke to hear from her when driving in snow. 

A fellow Markley denizen and I decided to hitchike down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Got picked up on US-23 by a couple of guys in a '67 Impala, who swerved over two lanes to stop for us. The guy in the passenger seat gets out and pops the trunk for us to stow our packs in, and we see the two rifles in the bottom of the trunk. Against our better judgement, we threw our gear in, and got in the car.

They were carnies from Florida.

There's more to the story, but it'll have to wait for a diary entry.

I was sitting at a stoplight in my 68 Cougar (I was probably 23 years old at the time) and these teenage girls behind me started throwing firecrackers under my car. I was NOT PLEASED.

Back in my college days in 1994 I was attending Northwood University in Midland. I had a 92 Mustang GT with a manual transmission and was out partying with three friends from school. I was at a stop sign down the street from one of their houses and was planning on turning left. I thought I heard one of them say "get on it", so I did. However, I lost control and swerved left, over corrected and swerved back right and both passenger wheels struck the abnormally high curbs they have up there, and we went for a ride. The car flipped onto the passenger side, and fortunately the two of us in the driver side weighed more than the other two, otherwise we would've continued rolling over onto the roof. The weight brought the car back down on all four tires, and then rolled backwards into a ditch. We walked back to our friend's house and called for a tow truck. I'll never forget those damn high curbs lol.

Ann Arbor parking tickets have always been bad.  I had a college roommate who had an old 70s El Dorado that was a rust bucket, piece of crap.  He had so many tickets that they impounded his car.  When he went to pick it up they told him it would cost more $ to get it released than the car was actually owrth, so he told them to keep it.

I was in high school and in my 2000 Olds Intrigue and line to leave the parking lot. To my right about 40 feet away my buddy goes "Hey UMx!" and starts making some obsence gestures with his hands and weiner. Me being distracted I tap the guy in front of me who I'm not quite friends with but talk to on a regular basis (he has late 90s early 2000s monte carlo). Everyone watching is laughing their ass off. Me being just kind of shocked and not sure what to do just sit there and the guy in front of me gets out to see if anything happened. I asked "is there any damage?" and he said no. We never talked about it again.

for my friend's bachelor party. Started with beer, finished with Jager bombs. (I was 23, bad decisions were a way of life). The night ended with bong rips and me falling onto my buddy's toilet hard enough to break the wax seal at the base of it. I passed out in his bathroom, but did not vomit, unfortunately.

The next morning, on the way back to Columbus, I was miserably hungover and freezing my ass off, so I wore my Carhartt jacket all morning. I ate a huge breakfast, hoping that coffee, eggs, hash browns, and bacon would make me feel better. They did not. My buddy was nice enough to drive, so I passed out in the passenger seat of my 2003 Saturn Ion beater with crank windows, coat on, as the sun came out.

I awoke to extreme nausea, which was likely assisted by the sun beating down on the front of my body along with my massive winter jacket heating my insides to critical temperature. I knew there were only a few seconds until I was going to barf, so I grabbed for the window, but could only crank it a few times before breakfast came up. As I craned my neck to get my head out of the car, my collar flipped up on my coat, partially covering my mouth. The vomit stream whooshed out of me with great force, splashing off of my collar, the window, and the car door, reeking horribly of licorice, coffee, breakfast etc. My buddy is laughing uncontrollably at this point, but manages to pull the car off of the highway (I-71) so I can finish hurling. The looks on the faces of the people at the gas station as I walked in to buy cleaning products, paper towels and air freshener was the icing on the cake.

I was driving on a backroad in Iowa and hit a deer. Just ran over a hind foot which slammed the deer down and killed it but did not even mess up the dirt on the front bumper of my pickup.

and we were heading home to Chicago with our dog.  We crossed the Bluewater Bridge and got to the border security booth.  Got asked the usual questions and told to proceed.  However, just as I start to roll forward, I hear a weird "beep-beep-beep" coming from the booth and the guy yells at me, "Halt!".  I then see 3 border agents with guns pulled running at my car.  From a distance, they herd me to the inspection area and tell us to get out of the car.  We grab the dog and get put in a room without a word being said.  I ask what's going on and no one will say a thing.  After 10 minutes or so, I hear one of the border agents say something like "Oh, 548 not 458".  A short while later, they tell us we can leave.  Once again, no one will say what any of this was about.  I guess they fat-fingered my license plate number, transposed the 4 and 5 and that turned out to be a very bad person law enforcement was looking for.  The dog made the best protest move.  She peed on the floor.  I decided to let them find it.

Motorheads Garage is the show of all car shows!

Back in the day I had an '85 Pontiac 6000 hand-me-down from my mom (price was right). One evening after soccer I get back to the car to find the rear window completely shattered, but still in place. I saw no sign of impact, like maybe a baseball had hit it, with circles around the area and spiderweblike cracks running out from there. No, it was cracked into small pieces, pretty uniformly, top-to-bottom and side-to-side. Very strange.

I started driving home. Vibrations made some of the pieces in the low center fall out. Then it started to rain. Not much got in, though. I got home and taped a garbage bag over it. Ended up buying a replacement from a junkyard.

The group of people I was exploring Colorado with spent a day hiking up Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, we had a group that still had not gotten back down the mountain by ten o'clock so I went back up to the trailhead to look for them. I got out and shined the flashlight around and yelled for the group, but got nothing and after about fifteen minutes decided I didn't like being alone in the woods on a moonless night.

When I got back to the car the effects of high altitude and exhaustion set in and I became convinced that an axe murderer was in the back of the car just waiting for me. My options were limited as I was fifteen minutes from the campground, but I seized on a brilliant solution, I would shine my flashlight on the backseat and let the guy know I knew he was there!

So I ended up driving through Rocky Mountain National Park with a flashlight shining on the back of the Suburban like a moron, until I got to the campsite, leaped out of the car and ran to the back of the car with my flashlight ready to bonk the evil ace murderer on the head, there was, of course, no-one there. The whole time I knew my paranoia was ridiculous but I could not turn it off. Needless to say the group was very amused by my antics and luckily the rest of our crew made it to the campground about an hour later, so all was well in the end. But if you ever think there's an axe murderer in the back seat, apparently shining a flashlight back there makes the bastard disappear.

I was home for spring break from Michigan in 96 or 97. Buddy of mine had his GFs Bday coming up or something and asks if I want to head to the mall. Sure, I said and he picks me up in his beater (no idea on make/model). This POS starts smoking halfway to the mall (on the highway, which at that speed if you notice it in that kind of wind it's a major amount of smoke) but he says it's NBD. We park at the mall and smoke is billowing form the engine, I'm like WTF, man? and he just says it's done this before - pops the hood and says it's fine. It'll cool down now that the engine's off. OK, w/e

So we head into the mall assuming just that. We're in there for probably 2 hours. At one point I overhead some mall worker say they smelled burning rubber, but it dodn't think anything of it. Later I thought I could hear my buddy's name over the intercom, but you how those things are in malls - just audible enough that you know there's an announcement, but have no fuckin clue what they're saying. 

So we're done 2 hourse later, get back out to the lot, can't find the car. Now this has happened to us all, we look a few rows over, no car. did we park on the other side of the mall? this row? WTF. I'm sure we parked where we were, and then notice one parking spot that is all wet and some weid white-ish jazz around the spot. I'm like, "Cory, I really think we parked in this spot, and I think there was a fire here"

So we go into the mall security office, saying we can't find the car. Security guys says oh, so you're the guys whose car caught fire - check out the video. We're like WTF! as we watch the parking lot security footage - car is a fucking BLAZE 10 mins after we left to go into the mall. Firetruck one shows up, followed by firetruck 2 and eventually the tow truck.

his Dad picked us up and drove us home. NBD in the end, but man had that fire spread to other cars...

My buddy had a early 60's Ford Falcon.  He had some after market tunes in that car.  It was an under the dash mounted 45 record player designed for a car.  It was crazy and the only one I ever saw.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0hRzEihsR4

 

   

She was in the back seat dumping her sippy cup out the window.  I did not infact know this until the Motorcycle rider expressed his disapointment.

My son use to drive his Cadillac out on the ice to go ice fishing.  Had his popup fish house in the back seat.