Alpharetta - Sunday - Heading Home (or so we thought)

With nowhere to be at any specific time today, we slept a little later, drank a couple of cups of coffee, showered, checked e-mail, and plotted our route home. We had a leisurely breakfast at the Peachtree Diner, conveniently located near our hotel. About 10 a.m., we hit the road. We decided to take a different route home, this time through Atlanta to Birmingham, then across Hwy. 78 to Memphis. Having lost our computer power (and hence our map program) on the way down, I decided to jot down all the turns from Atlanta to Birmingham, just to be safe. I used this note to guide us from Hwy. 400 in Roswell to the interstate in Atlanta. Unfortunately, I wasn’t wearing my glasses when I was writing down the directions, and what I thought was “Exit 48” was actually “Exit 4B.” Fortunately, we realized the error before we’d driven past the exit. I looked on down the list; I’d written down our next exit as “Exit 108.” Yeah, it was “Exit 10-B.”

We stopped for gas about an hour later, just outside Talladaga, Alabama (that’s “Talla-DAY-ger” to us Rednecks). We’d driven maybe 30 miles to Pell City, Alabama, when the Tahoe coughed a couple of times, a nasty, un-natural sound. Thinking quickly, Joel steered toward the nearest interstate exit and into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant, where the Tahoe sputtered a few more times, then quit, altogether. It would not crank again. “I think it’s the fuel pump,” Joel said. We called AAA for roadside assistance around 12:30. They said they’d send a tow truck, and that we should be deciding where we wanted the vehicle towed.

This being Sunday, there were no repair shops open. There was no Chevrolet dealership or AAA-approved repair shop in Pell City; the closest one was in downtown Birmingham. The tow truck arrived at 3 p.m. It was starting to rain as the driver hooked the cables to the Tahoe and winched it onto the tow truck. Joel and I climbed into the cab with him – my first tow truck ride – and we headed to Birmingham in the pouring rain.
As we were bumping and bouncing down the interstate, my cell phone rang. It was my daughter-in-law, calling to tell me how my grandson had been wallowing in mud-holes all day. At the end of the conversation, she asked if I’d talked to my son, Josh. When I said that I had not talked to him, she told me a little piece of gossip that made me gasp. I turned to Joel to let him in on the news: “The boys were target shooting from Grandmother’s back porch last night, and Allen SHOT Jeremy!” I could near my daughter-in-law on the phone, still telling the story, saying, “…I mean, Jeremy’s OKAY – he didn’t even have to go to the hospital - the bullet just ricocheted off a tree and bounced off his stomach….” As I was passing the details along to Joel, I happened to look over at the tow truck driver. He was staring straight ahead, wide-eyed and grim, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. I patted him on the knee, and told him, “Don’t worry, hon, WE are not armed.”

The tow truck driver had come from Jacksonville, Alabama. He’d been to Birmingham a good many times but was not completely sure how to get to the dealership. Thanks to his GPS, we found the place. Nice man that he was, he then offered to drive us to a hotel. His GPS said there was one a mile away. Tired and disgusted, we said, “Go for it.” The driver’s thoughts must have been a million miles away, for before we’d gone six blocks from the dealership, he’d already run two red lights. When we finally reached the hotel, we weren’t thrilled with the looks of the place, but we chose to stay there over riding a few more miles in the tow truck. After that gunshot story, he was probably as glad to be rid of us as we were to be rid of him.

We had dinner at a nearby Waffle House. We didn’t get precisely the meal we ordered, and Joel noticed some flaky black stuff floating in my iced tea glass, but we were too tired to care (though I did make the waitress swap my tea for water). Back in our room, we discovered that we had no internet access and the batteries in the TV remote were nearly drained. We watched an episode of “Foyle’s War,” and called it a night.