Giant Inflatable Santa Escapes Chains, Wreaks Havoc on Town
Don’t you just hate being late for work? Too often I slouch my way into the office 10 or 15 minutes late due to my own poor planning.
But sometimes an odd occurrence will snarl traffic and keep me behind the ball. Once, my daughter and I witnessed a shirtless man wandering in the middle of a six-lane highway, obviously dazed.
Of course, not everyone has such odd commuting experiences. Some have encounters that are even stranger.
Consider an encounter that drivers had near Kaeng Krachan National Park in Thailand’s central Petchaburi province. According to Hua Hin Today, wild elephants had rendered the roads dangerous during the summer.
Why? The giant mammals had taken to eating pineapples left on shoulders of the highway. See, farmers had taken to dumping their lower-quality fruit, stuff that they knew wouldn’t sell at market — and the tusked beasts had developed a taste for them.
Eventually there got to be so many of them that they blocked the 14-kilometer mark on a particular stretch of road. Soldiers had to come and clear out the massive beasts.
The New York Daily News reported that Thailand was once again the site of an unruly gathering of animals. This time, though, they weren’t iconic elephants.
Rather, driver Jack Saranthat captured a swarm of ducks that had overtaken a road in the province of Nakhon Pathom. More than 100,000 of the feathered fowl washed over the blacktopped stretch, so many that you couldn’t even see the road itself.
“I’m not sure why these ducks are in revolt,” he said. “You can see the great mass of ducks swarming on the road.
“They have now occupied the area entirely. … There could be as many as a hundred thousand ducks blocking the road.”
A more mundane blockage stopped traffic on a busy road in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, on Nov. 27. But even if it didn’t involve near biblical amounts of poultry, it still must’ve seemed pretty dramatic to drivers.
According to the BBC, a gargantuan inflatable Santa broke free from the yard of a house near Cromwell Road. It then floated out into the road, draping itself across a lane of traffic.
“It was massive, bigger than my seven-seater car,” motorist Muhammad Fareed said. He also captured it on his phone while waiting for vehicles to gingerly pull around the festive obstruction.
“I saw it wobble and then come down on to the road. It did raise a smile,” he added.
“It was one of the more unusual reasons to be stuck in traffic.” Fortunately, drivers didn’t have to wait all that long.
As Fareed drove by, he saw a couple of men trying to move the inflatable. They must’ve succeeded, because police later said that they didn’t receive a report of the blockage.
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