Man driving banana gets tip, not ticket
Steve Braithwaite spotted the flashing blue-andred police lights — and promptly pulled his banana off the road.
Braithwaite, 59, has spent the past two years driving his homemade, banana-shaped convertible across America, offering pay-what-you-can rides to fund his days and sleeping nights on strangers’ couches or in cheap motels. He’s become quite familiar with the police: Officers often pull him over, friendly but curious, and ask what on earth he’s doing.
So when he saw the state trooper ease onto the road behind him as he was driving down U.S. 223 near Adrian, Mich., on Oct. 27, Braithwaite thought he knew what was coming.
“We chatted. … He checked my headlights, brake lights, taillights,” Braithwaite said.
Braithwaite also explained his banana road trip, which he calls “The World Needs More Whimsy Grand Tour.” The trooper took Braithwaite’s license and walked away. When he returned, he handed the license back — but something was different.
“He had wrapped 20 bucks around it!,” Braithwaite said. “(Then) he just said, ‘Safe travels.’ ”
The trooper peeled out, and Braithwaite split, too — but he couldn’t stop thinking about the crumpled $20. He couldn’t wait to spread the word about the unexpected fruit of his most recent encounter with law enforcement.
Braithwaite didn’t get the trooper’s name, but Michigan State Police posted Friday morning on Facebook that the trooper, Bill Strouse, was just a few months away from retirement when he came across Braithwaite in the colossal banana.
“As a trooper, you never quite know what you’re going to see each day,” the post said.
When Braithwaite got to his destination after being pulled over that day, he posted on the “Big Banana Car” Facebook page about it — and things ripened rapidly. The post garnered hundreds of likes, shares and comments, eventually earning write-ups in local newspapers.
“It’s all been quite amazing,” Braithwaite said, adding that he’d like to give the trooper a free ride sometime.
Braithwaite, who moved to the United States in 1986 from his native England to follow a woman, said he built the ride because he wanted “to do something completely different and ridiculous.” He was living in Linden, Mich., and selling home address signs: “It paid the bills, but it was kind of boring.”
Eager to break the monotony, Braithwaite recruited a few friends, bought a Ford F-150, and set to work crafting “the world’s only motorized banana.” Working almost exclusively on Sundays, he got the job done in about 2 1/2 years at a cost of roughly $25,000.
After a brief stint building custom-designed, unusual vehicles, Braithwaite hit the highway in early 2018 and has been zooming across America ever since. He’s working on visiting all 50 states and still hopes to eventually cross the globe in his banana.