Out of Cheese

I seem to be doing a bit more than my fair share of keeping junk off of 280 recently. About two weeks ago, I saw a huge plastic bag in my lane just before I was about to get off at De Anza. I thought about swerving around it, but there was a lot of traffic at the time and I figured hitting a plastic bag, no matter how big, shouldn’t do much damage. It stuck to my car until just before I turned into the parking lot at Apple, but the car was fine.

Today on my way home from Cupertino, I was changing lanes just before Bird Avenue and drove right into a barbecue grill in the right lane. That’s right — a barbecue grill. On 280. Maybe someone was a bit confused about the location of their Memorial Day barbecue and decided to have one a quarter-mile north of the Bird Ave. exit. Fortunately it was one of the little semi-portable apartment patio ones rather than the larger variety. I heard a ton of crunching, pulled over, and called AAA because the last time I was in a car that ran over something huge on the freeway, the car (Lilly’s then-new Mercedes) wasn’t drivable afterwards and needed some annoyingly expensive repairs. I was luckier than Lilly, though, since the driver of the truck that AAA sent out took a look at my car, pulled off an assortment of barbecue grill pieces, and said that it should be fine (albeit a bit scratched up front). I guess Hondas are built rather well.

Hopefully the CHP won’t start thinking that if they want any random junk cleaned off of 280 they can just wait till I drive near it….