A Brit expat almost careered off the road when to his horror one of the world’s largest spiders suddenly appeared on his windscreen.
Lindsay Vine, from Kirkcaldy, Fife, struggled to keep his cool when the giant creature emerged as he was driving his pickup truck south from Sydney, in Australia.
Video images at the petrol station, where the 40-year-old finally stopped, showed the enormous arachnid lurking behind the passenger-side sun visor.
Lindsay gave a dramatic account of how the drama unfolded and what he said to the spider: “I’ve told him, if he f’ing moves one more time, I’ll crash and kill us.”
He said that he had been feeling quite comfortable on the highway until it began to go dark and the spider appeared in front of him.
“It was about an hour-and-a-half into my journey and it was dark,” said Vine.
“I was driving along the highway listening to some Cyndi Lauper and singing my heart out when all of a sudden, a shadowless entity appeared on the windscreen. It was a bloody huge spider!
“He just walked all blase across the entire window, actually stopping directly in front of me.”
Lindsay reckons the spider – a huntsman – was about the size of his outstretched hand.
“I was petrified mate,” he said. “I froze. My heart stopped and I locked arms. Some ancestral instinct kicked in to preserve all life on board.
“I knew there were spiders in Australia and I knew from watching Octonauts on TV that wildlife, mostly, only attacks if it feels threatened or scared.
“I also had to mentally prepare myself for the event of being jumped on. I just kept thinking of the ‘face hugger’ scene in the Alien movies and tried to formulate an instant action plan should that happen to me.”
For the next 20 minutes Lindsay carried on driving, looking for a place to stop – and then to his alarm the spider disappeared from view.
He continued: “I didn’t know if it had jumped on the passenger seat or dashboard, or even me!
“I s*** myself, not literally, but figuratively. That’s when I panicked a little and threatened to crash the car and kill us both if it didn’t make itself known.
“That’s also when little flies, mosquitoes or even air from the vents tickles your legs and you immediately think it’s the spider. It was total torture for 20 minutes in the pitch dark.
“I kept scanning the inside cabin, I’m genuinely amazed I didn’t crash that night – until I saw the spider hiding behind the passenger visor.”
At the petrol station, Vine opened the passenger door with a single finger, hoping the spider would scuttle out – but it remained unmoved.
“So I ran to a diner,” he said. “That’s where I found a towering brute of a beautiful bearded man. My hairy hero!”
The unidentified Aussie removed the spider from Lindsay’s car – and the
Scot has now written a poem to thank him.
Huntsman spider family are notorious for their size and include the largest spider in the world by leg span, the giant huntsman.
They have a venomous bite which they use to incapacitate their prey and which can cause headaches, vomiting and heart palpitations in humans.
But they are not generally seen as harmful to people.
Lindsay, who moved to Australia to be with his Aussie wife, said: “I did know that, generally speaking, the bigger the spider in Australia, the less likely it is to murder you.
“It’s the small ones you have to be worried about. But, coming from Scotland, where spiders are tiny, I didn’t want to risk being suffocated or stabbed by this one.”
He added: “I think I was very brave, actually my family disagree.”
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