jihad turkey!

brad and i've been having kind of a lazy weekend......we had been running so hard since we came out from hometime that we were both getting dangerously low on hours....so when we got this load going from nampa, idaho to jackson, tn and it didn't have to deliver until monday morning, we discussed our hours with our fm and figured out how instead of running it thru and dropping it early, we could use the weekend to do what is known as a rolling restart on our 70 hours ....that just basically means that when brad finished driving last wednesday, he started his 34 hour restart and i did all the driving thursday....then we shut down for thursday night, then he did all the driving friday and i had enough hours to do my 34 hour restart ....it cuts down your miles a little, but it gives you a slower pace and sometimes you just need that to regroup your spirits as well as you log book hours........anyway, we'd been enjoying it and having time to have good meals and long night's rests.....we'd stopped last nite in percival, iowa where a popular shortcut thru nebraska meets up with i-29 coming down thru western iowa and on into kansas city, mo......i usually get up and hit the road around 4 or 5 am but this morning i'd slept in a little and didn't start out till 7.......i'd been on the road about 2 hours and had just gotten off i-29 onto i-435, the beltway around kansas city.....it was an overcast morning with just a light drizzle every now and then......out of nowhere into my field of vision came this humungous bird....at first i really couldn't tell if it was a turkey or a hawk.....it was headed right for my windshield and before i had anytime to react, it slammed into driver's side of the windshield, shattering it into a million tiny little tiles of safetyglass......the glass actually buckled inward under the impact of the bird and a gazillion little shards of glass sprayed both me and the cab of the truck......i had a purple top on and when i looked down , it looked like my shirt was covered with glitter! instantly, i could no longer see thru the broken glass but i managed to get the truck onto the shoulder of the road and stopped . brad had been awake but hadn't gotten up yet and at first he thought we'd had a blowout.....but when i yelled at him to get up, i don't think he could hardly believe what he saw......the first thing he did was get our sweeper out and clean the glass off of me before he would let me move.....it's amazing that i didn't get any cuts and haven't had any glass splinters, so far anyway..........after he got dressed, and after all the calls we had to make about the incident, we managed to get the truck on down the road about a mile and a half where we could get safely off the road.......we spent along time cleaning up the truck and they sent another truck out to repower the load on to tennessee.......so here we are till tomorrow morning when they can put a new windshield in.......i'm figuring that we'll be cleaning up glass shards again after that.....i can't imagine that they could get this one out with out it coming all apart......

the whole thing did give us time for a nice visit this afternoon with virgil and cattleya and the kids......when they heard what happened, the drove up from kansas city and crowded into the cab with us for a couple of hours.....then they went and got lunch for everybody and again we nestled into the truck like sardines in a can......we had a great visit tho..........brad and i had just been talking the other day about how we will go for years without being hit by a small bird.....and then it seems like once one hits you, within a few days one or two more will do the same.....it's weird, i know....it always makes me think alfred hitchcock.....lol......i'm really hoping that only goes for small birds and not game fowl!!