Adventure Date: 12/26/17
Padre Island National Seashore has lots of nice traveling roads for driving or biking. They are long and carefully restricted to 45 mph or less for the safety of the visitors. Near the entrance of PINS is a kiosk that the check in ranger uses. The speed limit in this area is 5 mph and they mean it.
The speed bumps to remind you to slow down when in this area in close proximity to folks are serious. They are well done with gentle ramps to the top and back down so at 5 mph they are a gentle event. However they are also high enough to make you wish you had slowed down as the ample signs requests you to do.
The OFM Teams were over at the trail that is close to the check-in location gathering information for a future blog entry. Suddenly there was this horrible loud noise like lots of stuff bouncing down the highway and then screaming tires. The OFM moved as fast as he could to get a view of the direction the sound came from.
By the time he got clear of the dune to see what was going on the vehicle driver was getting out of his vehicle. We could see that the rear carrier was empty. In a few moments other folks exited the vehicle and ran back along the road. They hurriedly got very busy picking up things from the road. The driver worked at the rear of the vehicle while the others brought him stuff. In about ten minutes they had it all together and drove SLOWLY off.
When the picture the OFM took was brought up on the computer screen and enlarged for editing we could see all the stuff on the bumper carrier. The stuff that was not on the carrier is circled in orange with the arrow pointing to the general direction where it was littering the highway. Just in front of the pilings tied with rope is the first of the speed bumps. Just left of the front of the vehicle is the kiosk and another serious speed bump.
We are guessing the driver ignored the smaller speed bumps as he approached the kiosk/people area and hit the larger bump still doing a lot more speed than desirable. The trail we were on has the parking lot near this spot so there frequently very small kids running around not paying attention. Slowing down is critical for safety.
From the sound of the vehicle when it came back down, we would think it will be needing some alignment work in the near future. Personally the Teams do not think flying a vehicle is a good way of trying to have tooooo much fun.
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