I have seen and experienced a lot of things when driving on the Autobahn through Germany. I have seen quite a few crashes, smaller and larger ones. To this day I’m unsure if there was a person under a sheet on the street or if it was just a dropped sheet when i had to slowly drive on the other direction of the Autobahn, because of course there were gawkers that hat do drive 30 or 20 kph just to look and I’m sure I saw the light of mobile displays in fron of me. I decided it was a dropped sheet when i was back home just to keep that thought from haunting me. I never looked up that accident and I won’t do it in the future.
Once i had to run on the tarmac behind my car with a signal triangle in my hands, because a car ( a compact car from the Netherlands) crashed into another already crashed car (i thing, it was a Jaguar with a driver that already moved itself away from the scenery, i think DUI was in discussion, but that was more than 20 years ago) and moved the whole pile of metal into my direction. Was quite shocked and 15 minutes later when the police came i had still the warning triangle in my hands. The compact car burned out, but only minor injuries in that car.
A few months ago, I saw that squared timber pieces that the local radio station reports about in the traffic advisories all the time, but what i never saw. I think 3 or 4 months ago when getting back from southwest Germany I saw a car standing on three wheels on the emergency lane and the fourth wheel significantly further in the direction of travel. Of course, i had one or two times the experience of driving at high speed on the Autobahn just to be overtaken by car giving me the impression to be able to just open the door and get out of the car. But while this is not a frequent occurrence, it happens. If you are driving a lot, you are seeing a lot.
But yesterday was really a new one. I was driving with my brother to a city in or close to the Ruhr area to fetch his newest project to build a Minicamper. Quite a ride when you are only able to ride at 80 kph because you have a trailer behind you. I’m on vacation and needed some distraction. My on-board navigation told me: “Caution! Animals on the road” and i normally think about a cow, a horse or something like that, perhaps a dog. But no … quite a WTF moment yesterday. A SWAN was standing on the emergency lane. Those animals are larger than you think, even when you are used to them because there a few on the Alster lake in Hamburg, if a swan is standing at the side of your car on the Autobahn you see how damned large they are.