What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen on the road recently?

I’ve done A LOT of driving in the last week. I went to a writer’s retreat in Missouri weekend(see last post); my father-in-law is having cancer treatments, so we went to visit him mid-week; and then this past weekend I had a conference for therapy dog people and also visited my dad. I’ve spent so much time on the road (and the audio book I packed wasn’t anywhere near long enough!) that I got bored with the license plate game, so I came up with a new game to amuse myself. I call it: “What are people hauling on the roads today?” Here are some of the things I saw being hauled between here and the Twin Cities on my way up last Friday and on my way back yesterday:

–campers
–boats (though not as many as I would’ve expected considering I was in Minnesota! Maybe I had to go north of the Twin Cities to see more?)
–motorcycles
–4-wheelers
–bicycles
–golf carts
–other cars and trucks (the guy pulling the car carrier with NINE cars/trucks on it wins the prize for most cars/trucks being pulled by a single cab)
–bulldozers
–part of a silo
–many, many farm machines
–a backhoe
–gasoline
–mattresses
–sheets of glass
–grain
–corn on the cob
–pigs (many, many trucks pulling pigs)
–horses
–furniture
–households (via moving trucks)
–bookshelves
–boxes
–tires
–computers
–building supplies
–2x4s
–scrap wood
–mail
–packages (via Federal Express and UPS)
–sand
–concrete
–pop
–bread
–school food
–other food (I remember passing a Panera truck, a McDonalds truck and several grocery store trucks)
–Target merchandise
–hoses (an entire open trailer full of hoses…go figure!)
–windmill blades (and unless you’ve actually driven by a truck pulling one of these blades, you probably can’t appreciate just how BIG a Midwestern windmill is!)
–half a house (I never did drive by the other half of the house)
–a World War II torpedo! (I kid you not! And I think this one wins the prize for most interesting thing I saw on the road! I saw it in Waterloo, IA!)
–all kinds of mystery items I couldn’t see hidden beneath tarps and inside unmarked semis and other trucks.

There’s a story in each of those vehicles. Each one was driven by a character…each character was transporting something for some reason (some of those reasons may have been vitally important, others not so much)…maybe they wanted to be on the road; maybe they didn’t. The miles went faster as I thought about all the stories I was passing on the road.