The Drive (Day 1)

I’m going to preface this section by saying that I will NEVER, EVER do this again. Slap me immediately if the words UHaul and/or tow dolly ever come out of my mouth.

I woke up early Monday…anxiety-induced insomnia. We left to go pickup my new laptop from the post office at 8am, then made our way to the Uhaul place at 9. Just as I was pulling into the uHaul place, a lady from UHaul called me and asked if I would pick up the uHaul from a different location, “only 10 miles away.” She would take off $150 from my rental. OK, why not? After 30 minutes of driving, I called to bitch that it was not 10 miles away. She knocked off another $50. By this time, we’re running behind, and Jim Bob at the UHaul gives me NO instruction on the tow dolly, no helpful tips…even after my mom gave him the leftover chicken biscuit from our breakfast. Redneck a-hole.

SO we head back home to load the stuff from our garage. That takes a little while, at which time, we are 30 minutes late to meet the movers at my storage unit, where the lion’s share of my stuff is. They did a really good job, though it barely all fit in the uHaul. As they loaded the truck, I saw lots of stuff I’d forgotten I had in the year it had all been in storage.

So now, we have the task of loading my car on the tow dolly, which is pulled behind the uHaul truck. We try to pull over to a small parking lot by the storage unit office to get the truck and trailer straight, and in the process, I manage to hit the rear end of a guy’s truck. He is very nice about it and it didn’t do any damage, but I feel like a gigantic moron…though I learned a valuable lesson about “turning wide.” More on that later. We get the car loaded, Mom, Dottie and I jump in the cab, and we’re off. We stop for gas and a few potty breaks, but we drive straight through Chattanooga before we stop for dinner in the Monteagle truck plaza. For those in the know, the is the exit before Mary Beth’s lakehouse off I-24. I vote that we should gas up and grab the next Cracker Barrel, but my mom vetoes me, saying that we should make less stops. OK…but don’t say I didn’t tell you so. It was like a Deliverance version of Cheers. The same locals hanging out…and one lady I’m pretty sure was a “lot lizard”… a term passed on from Doug to me to my mom. The food took 30 minutes, then we only got one plate. We decided to cancel the other and just share…we were so ready to leave the abandoned-looking, Twilight Zone restaurant.

So we continued to our final destination of the day…Louisville, KY. It’s about 10pm and I pretty wiped. We get off the highway and are being guided by the GPS to the hotel. What the GPS fails to recognize is that we’re in an 11ft high truck, and it’s telling us to go under a 10ft high bridge. I couldn’t see the height on the bridge until we were ¾ of the way down a tiny two-lane road, so I’m forced to try to back up and turn around. Tip to the unaware: you can’t back a Uhaul with a car on a tow dolly…it’s a recipe for a jackknife. Oh yeah…the turning wide thing again:) I’m rapidly reaching the end of my rope…wtf am I gonna do? Then a nice young man came along and offered to help. We ended up unloading the car, backing the truck enough to turn it around, then reloading the car…then the guy led us to the hotel, the long way so we wouldn’t encounter and more bridges. He was a lifesaver. My mom offered him a free buddy pass whenever he wants to go somewhere. We got to the hotel around midnight, which was good, because I was completely done for the day. And btw, the Best Western in Louisville smells like pee and vomit, plus they put us in a huge conference room hotel room with a Murphy bed and a fold out couch. Bi-zarre.

Days 2 and 3…to be continued.