There's a shrimp crawling up the driveway!

Ok, so it wasn't actually a shrimp, but that was the only little sea creature that came to mind when we saw this thing crawling up our driveway when we opened our garage door on Tuesday morning.

Turns out it was a crayfish (duh, shrimp don't have claws), but that didn't make it any less weird in my mind since we live in the middle of NC and there's not a stream or other body of water within reasonable crawling distance from our house.

Adam actually called me outside in a frenzy to get me to look, and my first thought from a far glance was that it was a ginormous tarantula. Then I thought scorpion for a split second before I realized it was a crustacean. Adam and I pulled out our phones to get a picture because we could hardly believe our eyes. It was seriously just so bizarre. I actually asked our neighbor if they had some dinner that had gotten away (go ahead, laugh, but that made just as much sense to me as anything at that point)!

When we got up close, he raised up and either got defensive, or tried to ask for directions, cause clearly he was way lost.

"Back the heck off or I'll pinch you!"



"Oh hey, guys? Which way to the water?"


We didn't know what to do with it. Adam initially was just going to leave him there, and told me not to run over him on my way out of the driveway. I told him he was crazy, I didn't want squished shrimp in our driveway, so he had to get rid of it. He ended up getting it to grab onto a stick and dropped it down the storm drain in the hopes that it would make its way back to water.

So apparently, it's not weird for crayfish to burrow in yards, which is obviously something I've never heard of. One of my coworkers said he's got some in his yard, and when he was younger, they'd drop a hot dog down into the hole to fish them out. Fun stuff.

We're thinking our neighbors somehow unearthed it during some landscaping they've been doing, but honestly we have no idea. So now I feel kind of bad that we dropped him down the storm drain, probably away from his home. Oh well...