KINGSVILLE — A 41-year-old Leamington man has been charged with impaired driving earlier this week after leaving a restaurant drive-thru at the wheel of a riding lawnmower. 
OPP media officer Const. Steve Duguay said the driver was first spotted by police driving the mower into a Talbot Street West restaurant’s drive-thru.
“The officer was just doing general patrol and observed him entering the drive-thru. He sat and waited for him to come out … and that’s when he did the traffic stop,” Duguay said.
“I don’t want to be giving away too many details. He just saw some unusual driving behaviour … (the rider of the lawnmower) wasn’t driving the most straight of lines.”
This isn’t the first time someone in the Kingsville-Leamington area has been charged with impaired driving under unusual circumstances. 
In 2008, a 34-year-old Kingsville woman was charged with impaired driving after witnesses saw her operating a Zamboni erratically at the Kingsville Arena. 
Spectators at a hockey game saw the Zamboni hit the rink boards and fail to resurface large swathes of the ice. 
Witnesses told police the driver stopped the ice-resurfacing machine at one point and was seen slumped over the wheel.
Duguay said that in 2012, early in his OPP career, he investigated a report of a drunk driver travelling the streets of a small Ontario town on a motorized picnic table. 
“These guys in Huron County took an old lawn mower, put wheels on the table and put a drive chain on one of the wheels and had a motorized picnic table,” he said.
With no supervisor to consult, Duguay charged only one of the three men aboard the motorized picnic table. 
The man was charged with having an open container of alcohol.
“In hindsight, I could have charged all three (with impaired driving) because all three had access to the controls,” he said.
Duguay, citing the Criminal Code, said “a motor vehicle is a vehicle  drawn, propelled or driven by any means other than muscular power.”
However, on water, canoeists and kayakers can be charged if they test over the limit, he said.
Duguay also noted individuals can be charged with impaired driving even while operating a motorized vehicle on private property.