The Bird

Our stay in Durban was fantastic and we reluctantly left it's warm temps for the much colder [35-40F] climate of Johannesburg. The road was quite straight and as I took over driving the last 3 hour stretch at 730a, I was hitting some pretty solid speed. In the States, cars/humans have a deal with birds and other small critters that occasionally wander onto streets and highways; George Costanza says it best: "They get out of the way of our cars; we look the other way on the statue defocations."

This is not the case in South Africa. Didier and I were cruising along at around 90mph jamming to the sounds of the 90s [Candlebox - Far Behind], and in the distance, I noticed a flock of large turkey sized birds hanging out, for no reason, in the middle of the highway. As I neared, most cleared the road but one of these arrogant bastards stayed his ground...it was too late for me to swerve or John, who was calmly sleeping, moustache glistening in the rising sunlight, would have woken up grumpy and pissed. The deal was off: it was if I hit a small bag of flour and the thud reverberated through the cars pedals and was still loud enough for John to wake up, grunt, and shake his head disapprovingly as Kenny, Fuge and I laughed in utter shock and disbelief. I quickly turned on the wipers to remove the pink/red 'body parts' that had relocated to the windshield.

We soon needed to fill up and about 30 miles later we pulled into the gas station, slowing our speed. As I did this, several feathers, arranged too perfectly to be remnants were standing up with the wind resistance lowering. No one said a word until we stopped, and Kenny got out with video rolling. I first remember, Kenny yelping/laughing and unable to keep his composure as we all realized that that arrogant bird, who stood his ground, had travelled the last 30 miles with us, embedded in our grill, ass out. The local gas station workers hurried over asking us to pop our trunk. As if it were a twig stuck in a tree, they quickly pulled it out taking some pieces of our grill out with it. If anything could make this situation even more ridiculous, two of the attendants took the bird out as if it was a prized catch and rushed over to the nearest trash can and began plucking off its feathers. Our final image of this situation is seeing these two run off to the back of the station with a plucked bird for what purpose is anyone's best guest.

After a quick duper from John, we got the hell out of there asap. Luckily, the removal of the bird was caught on video and we'll post that and other pictures/videos as soon as we can get the data off of our cameras. As Kenny later stated, this literally could have been a scene from a Chevy Chase, "African Vacation" movie and we are all still processing this situation with so many ridiculous turns.

The Damage