I don't know why I think this is so funny (link via Ken Layne). Maybe because part of the fun of road trips are all the quirky, dopey little things you do or get amused by, one of them being the raucous assortment of insects that get stuck in the windshield wipers. Drive 5,000 miles at high speed and you'll have some trophies.

A common event would be to see a particularly large insect--say a butterfly or locust or some such evil biblical creature--hurtle into the path of the car, and the passenger would call it out, and in the fraction of a second akin to the pitch in baseball were I a baseball watching kind of guy you'd make a silent bet with yourself whether or not it would hit the windshield. I think once, Robert was actually fast enough to make that bet out loud.

They almost always made an audible 'thunk,' followed by the pasty streak on the glass.

We did a lot of window cleaning.

Wiper highlights: two hundred miles after striking a very large locusty looking thing, we pull off to get gas. It's still twitching. That's guts. We too mauled one of those stunning, southern, yellow and black and blue butterflies. Sniff. The highlight was stopping at some point and looking at the tangled mess in one of the wiper blades and realizing that an all yellow butterfly was locked in a frozen, titanic battle with an insanely huge waspy death critter. There's some unknown story there. Could it be mere chance that these two got tangled up together on the same stretch of wiper blade? Maybe the wasp attacked the butterfly in midflight, thinking "ah HA! Gotcha, ya giant yellow bastard! Trophy meal of the day!"

We showed him.