  Ow Well, we're finally back in Alabama. Friday's trip was very short, since Diamond got tired a lot earlier than I was expecting.
We ended up stopping in Clarksville, Arkansas for the night around 2:30am, and left out again around 10:45am. Saturday's trip was plagued with congested traffic right off the bat, from about 5 miles and an hour of slow going because the morons in eastbound I-40 were gawking at a wreck which occured in the westbound lanes.
Sure, there was a police car on the left shoulder of the east lanes, but he wasn't slowing traffic, he wasn't closing a lane, it was still two fully open lanes. I really hate people, sometimes. After that was some construction which slowed things down, albeit not nearly as much as the gawkers, but after Little Rock things went pretty smooth all the way to Memphis. Memphis isn't bad, unless you're on I-40 and looking for Highway 72. We've missed the turnoff every time we've gone through Memphis, but up to this point, every time has been in the middle of the night and we'd assumed we've just missed it. Nope! There is no signage, no indicator of where to turn off for Highway 72. Nothing. Nada.
Zilch. Zip. We finally got off someplace familiar.. the same dreck we went through last Christmas in Memphis, and we even stopped at the same gas station, unintentionally. I checked a map there, got my bearings, and then as we got ready to pull out of the parking lot, something occurred up on the north side of the intersection.. another wreck. This time, much more significant. It closed down both lanes of northbound traffic, clogging cars in the intersection, and they had three police out there directing traffic.
We sat in that little snafu for 30 minutes, the whole time only trying to turn around. We get turned around, headed in the direction which the map had indicated, and it put us right back where we'd started.
I decided to forget the map and go with my original intent, which was to head east on 385 until we got to someplace where I was familiar with, and finally got ourselves on track after an hour and a half in Memphis (which involved our generous donation of 10$ to some guy looking for an "alternator belt. " Difficulties with our debit card from Redstone didn't help, either. We had something like 465$ in the checking account for it, and I know gas is expensive, but we didn't spend nearly that much before the card started getting declined for some reason unknown to us. The "help line" on the back of the card only helps if you're trying to report a lost or stolen card. Somebody tell me something... if you lose the card, then you're not going to have the phone number on the back of the card unless you wrote it down somewhere ahead of time.
Does this not make sense to anybody else??? I have the card, I need help with the card.. arghgh! After Memphis, though, everything went smoothly. We got into Athens around 10:45pm last night - about 4 hours behind schedule. That is by far the worst move I've ever had the displeasure of participating in. But I'm glad to be back. 
