Animals and Driving... "Yay!"...

Hey everyone! I'm currently sitting in a hotel room in Kingdom City while the two Envirothon teams prepare for tomorrow's state competition. I didn't want to lug my Northwest laptop around, especially since the mentors go on a mentors' tour during the competition. Instead, I decided to bring Osba! During college, I had a friend who picked up a handful of really small laptops off of eBay and was planning to refurbish them and sell them online for a profit. Since I didn't have a laptop, I was able to buy one off of him. It's very simplistic - i.e. I'm writing this in WordPad right now. It's also quite small - it's too small for a disk drive even. This makes the keyboard notably smaller, but I'm doing pretty well so far. Oh, and why did I name it Osba? Well, the batch of computers my friend picked up were all Toshibas, but this computer had all the letters peeled off except for "OS" and "BA". Hence, "Osba". I forgot to grab the wireless Internet card for Osba, so that's why this entry is being posted on Thursday, while it was written on Wednesday.

TC

As I predicted yesterday, my day today was pretty centralized about preparing for this trip and then driving here. However, I felt like sharing a couple of stories. Let's go in a list format!

TIMES I HIT OR ALMOST HIT ANIMALS WHILE DRIVING

NOTE: Some animals were harmed in the following stories. Not deliberately or maliciously, but still. They were hurt.

1. The first time I was in a car when it hit an animal was in high school. My friend was driving me back to my house after hanging out at his house, which is out of town in some woods. We turned a corner and noticed a deer just standing in the middle of the road. We were only going 30 or so to begin with, but my friend slowed down to a crawl. We ended up stopping right in front of the deer, but it remained motionless. My friend may have honked the horn (I don't fully remember), but if he did, the deer was unphased. My friend decided to creep up and bump the deer in the leg at around 2 miles an hour. Once the deer was touched, he burst into life and leapt into the nearby woods.

2. The first time that I hit an animal while *I* was driving was a couple of summers ago, shortly after getting my first car. I was driving in between Fargo and Minneapolis to see some high school and college friends (including the guy from #1) and I was on a fairly straight stretch of road. There were some cars around me and I was in the right lane of a 2-lane highway. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a duck flying towards the highway and he banks right, so he's flying the same direction as I'm driving. He's definitely not going as fast though, because he's quickly approaching my windshield. There was a car next to me, so I couldn't quickly change lanes and before I knew it, there was a large *thunk* and the duck bounced off my windshield away from the highway.

3. Okay, this one is what I would classify as my first animal collision, based on what initially comes to mind for most people. It was my birthday a year ago and up until this point, it had been a good birthday. A co-worker and I took some students to go late-night skiing and we were driving back to campus around midnight. It was an empty stretch of road between St Joe and Maryville and I was driving in front of the other van when two deer jumped out from the ditch in front of us. I hit the brakes, but it wasn't enough to avoid both deer completely and I ended up clipping the second deer's back leg. Thinking back, I feel like I might have been in danger of getting rear ended had I gotten to a halt quicker based on how close we were driving. We pulled both vans to the side of the road and everything turned out okay. All of the students were okay and my van didn't get dented or scratched. The only remnant of the scuffle was some hair stuck in my bumper or license plate. When I tell this story, people ask "what happened to the deer?" Honestly, I didn't care about it then because I was focused on the students and then the van. Afterwards, I was shaken up so I didn't look back, especially since we drove a little bit in order to pull over to the shoulder. I like to think that I knocked the deer into the ditch, but I'm pretty sure I didn't kill it immediately, so I'm sure it at least got off the road.

4. Fast forward to this spring when I take the Robotics students to Iowa City for the FTC-Iowa Championship. I was doing daily blogs at this point, but since this happened on the return trip, it wasn't included in my short post-trip blog. Anyway, we were driving back to campus at night and we were a handful of miles away from the Missouri state border when I see the car in front of me drive by two deer, both standing on the right shoulder. I had kept my distance to give me time to react, so I cautiously drove by the deer with my foot posed above the brake pedal. Fortunately, nothing. Shorty after that, the car in front of me sees a deer running away from the highway on the right shoulder. "Good," I thought, "at least it's running away from me". I didn't see any additional deer when I drove past that spot. Shortly after that, the headlights in front pick up about six deer, all moseying on the right shoulder and in the right lane. "For f*** sake", I thought, "what is it about this stretch of road?" I quickly swerved into the left lane and none of the deer acted up as I drove past them, although a couple of the students were jolted away by my quick lane change. I should mention that this trip was in a shuttle bus, like the ones that take elderly citizens around town to run errands with the hydraulic doors and everything. I am quite thankful that I had a car in front of me to give me extra visibility and fortunately, neither of us had any trouble. 

5. In case you're wondering why I'm writing about this, today makes for entry number 5 on the list. Stupid, stupid deer. I'm on a 3 or 4-lane highway in what people could consider the northern lip of Kansas City. It was very much daytime still, but I suddenly see four deer just running from the right shoulder towards the car in front of me. The car in front is able to zip in front of all the deer, but they are continuing to run towards the other lanes, which included going through the one I'm in. I had my foot on the brakes and by the time I got to the deer, I was still moving, but fairly slowly. I'm going to attribute this to a combination of luck and divine intervention, but when I got to the deer, three of them had run past me (so they were on my left) and one was behind the group and was still on my right. I didn't hit any of them, even a leg clipping, but I was definitely on red alert. As I drove away, I saw that the deer continued to run across the road, including the other direction of traffic and it looked like they were started to split up from each other. Definitely glad I was dealing with the deer when they were going as one unit mostly. The students commended me on my driving, but I'm just thankful it wasn't raining or a busier time of day.

5.5 Oh, right. Today was a two-parter because I was driving under an overpass and I see two birds zip in front of me. Similar to the duck, I barely register the situation before I hear a thunk and there's a yellow splotch on the windshield. I think I may have hit both birds between they were flying above/below one another rather than to the left/right and I feel like there was a second thunk on my grill/bumper. I feel like I should remind you that today's trip was for the *Envirothon* state competition. As in the organization committed to educating students about the environment, including wildlife. I feel like this is a situation with legitimate irony.

Fortunately, that's the end of the list. There is a 20-minute drive between the hotel and the competition site tomorrow morning, so we'll have to see how that and the 4-hour drive back home fare. Stupid, stupid deer. With it being an early morning, I should get to bed. Good night and I'll see you on Thursday. DFTBA.