2013: Bugs In The South

We wanted to get the villa early, so we woke up and left the hotel at the crack of 10am. I thought we might leave earlier but that is a foreign concept to our family.


I have the USS Gilbert testing the laws of physics as we fly a Warp 7 down Interstate 95. We are making really good time. I am good at driving at these speeds as I zoom pass all the slow driving mouth breathers. Occasionally, one of those mouth breathers end up in my path and in the lane that I have claimed ownership of. I don't like to tail gate, so, when this happens I make sure there is a good three feet between our cars. When you hear three feet, you are probably thinking "Why are you so far back?" Keep in mind, we are traveling at 75-80mph. And usually Linda is digging her nails into the dash board and screaming something insignificantly annoying like she's going to die or something.

What usually happens during situations when I am stuck behind a slower car is another car comes up and starts tail gating me... like it is my fault there is a slow moving mouth breather in front of me! Inevitable, my tailgater will attempt to pass me. They will blow by me. And they think they are going to fit into that three foot area between me and the car in front of me. So, what do I do? Right! I close the gap down to only two feet. No one, and I mean no one, is going to be passing me!


We sail through South Carolina an into George making incredible time. I think we are doing pretty good. And then it happens. In the south, there are bugs. Lots of bugs. And these bugs get huge. Some of these bugs could carry off a small child. We were traveling faster than permitted when we hit a bug that was the size of a bird. When a bug hits the windshield, they just exploid into indescribable little pieces. When I hit this Godzilla bug, it was like hitting a water balloon. It exploded and covered half the windshield. I'm driving faster than I should be and I'm trying to look through bug guts that have streaked across the windshield. And I'm looking at the guts and I'm thinking "What is that?"; but I really don't want to know.

In our trip to Florida in 2009, we were behind a tractor trailer that was leaking oil. The oil got on the windshield. I thought the oil was water so I used the windshield wash to try to wash it off. All the windshield wash did was smear the oil across the window shield and blinded me while driving 80MPH down the high way.

You would think I had learned my lesson from the 2009 trip. But I hadn't. Because I decided to use the windshield wash to wash the bug guts off the windshield. All that did was take the bug guts that were spread across half the wind shield and smear the guts across the entire windowshield! I was blinded by bug guts. At this point, I'm holding down the windshield wash. I think I empty half the tank of washer fluid trying to make a port-hole through the guts that I could see through. That was a giant bug! Luckily, we survived and faired much better than that bug did.