It was a beautiful day for late August in Georgia.
It also happened to be my birthday. My wife asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday, and I said I want to do something different today.
I don’t want to go to a restaurant for a nice birthday dinner.
I told her that I wanted to do something I’d never done before.
I wanted to go and see the Georgia guide stones. The stones are out in the middle of nowhere in northeast Georgia. It was a bit of a trek to get there.
If you want to check them out, here is the link, they are surely an enigma:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
No one really knows who paid for them. It’s just that one day some guy came into the town with a pocket full of money and wanted a place to put this monument.
Some say they were Rosicrucians but no one really knows.
But the story isn’t really about the guide stones it’s more about the trip home.
We decided to come home a different way. The way we chose to come home took us through some scenic country and also some small towns in North Georgia. As we were leaving Cleveland Georgia we inadvertently got behind a truck carrying chicken renderings.
Now if you know anything about chicken processing plants, you know that renderings are the waste products like intestines etc.
They let these products sit in the back of a truck for two or three days until the truck is full, then they haul them to another plant where they make dog food, cat food and fertilizer. Now I have to tell you if you’ve ever been behind a hog truck you know how bad they smell.
Well, truthfully a hog truck has nothing on a chicken renderings truck. It was seriously bad so we pulled off the road to let the truck go on. But this particular highway had stop signs so we would catch back up to the truck every once in a while. We pulled off the road two times to let the truck get ahead because we couldn’t pass on this two-lane highway. We finally came to a red light that had a turn lane, the truck was stopped at the red light and I knew that if I got in the turn lane when the light turned green I could pass the truck by making an improper lane change.
I told Valerie that I could do this but it was highly illegal. She told me to do it anyway so I did because she could no longer stand the smell of the truck and to tell the truth, neither could I. When I pulled into the turn lane next to the truck I couldn’t see the road to the right or what was on it.
Well it turned out that there was a state trooper sitting in the lane that I could not see because of the truck. When the light turned green I gassed it and got ahead of the truck. The trooper saw me doing that and he turned on his blue lights, they were all over the car the top, the bottom and the sides were all blue lights.
I said “oh crap we’re in trouble now.” I pulled over into a store parking lot and got out my driver’s license. As the trooper walked up to the car we started laughing about the whole thing because it was really funny.
The trooper took my license looked at it and said, “do you know why I stopped you?” I said, “yes sir I do but that chicken truck was so bad that my wife told me to do it anyway.” Well Valerie was over there laughing her butt off at the whole thing and told the trooper that she told me to do it, still laughing. The trooper asked why we didn’t just pull off the road and let the truck go ahead. I say we’ve already done that twice and still caught up with the truck. So when I saw the chance to get ahead, I did. Valerie was still laughing at this point and told the trooper again that she told me to do it and it was my birthday.
The trooper started smiling and said, “well I just didn’t know what you were doing, but by now the truck is way ahead of you, so go ahead, and gave me back my license.
He was sort of laughing to at this point and I’m sure that he told his trooper buddies that that was the first time a wife had ever told him that she told me to do it. Surely most of the time the passenger would say not to do something like that. And I’m sure that he knew how bad the truck smelled and took pity on me.
But, as it turned out everything was fine and we didn’t catch back up to the truck again.
We got home with no more incidents but we for sure laughed the whole way.
Great story; sometimes, things are meant to turn out right. It was your birthday after all. Thank you for sharing, Walt. By the way, your comment on my limerick today was exactly what happened to me. I'm still not over her. :) Love and peace,
I don't know if I would have been as daring to pull off such a stunt and I'm not one to hesitate behind the wheel. I'm glad everyone's sense of humor prevailed and you got a free ticket to ride, so to speak.
I LOVE IT as a former CHP officer (California Highway Patrol), heard a lot of them but I have never heard a wife tell me she told him to do it. Needless to say, I would have laughed it off and let the guy go with just a warning. Here in California, our motor vehicle laws are stricter and we do not have those kinds of trucks and that cargo is by law not allowed to leak not even a drop. Loved this write, although I thought it was going one place and it instead went another.
Now, that's the lamest excuse I ever heard. But it's true, and that's what got everybody laughing. It's a good thing that state trooper had such a good sense of humor. I wouldn't need anyone to tell me to do as you did. In fact, I think I've done that very thing.
Speaking of hog trucks. I've never experienced what you have, and only once have I experienced a hog truck. This one left a trail so long, that I could smell it for a few miles before I ever got to it! Like you, I couldn't get around the damn thing. If the chicken guts truck smelled worse, the only thing I ever smelled worse than the hog truck, was skunk.
We often ask the rhetorical question, why did the chicken cross the road but I can't ever recall asking why did the driver pass the chicken waste truck!
The Wholly Book of Genesis is a humorous satire on the first book of the Old Testament where the Story of Creation, the building of Noah's Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah and the families of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are thoroughly spoofed and broadsided.
It was a beautiful day for late August in Georgia.
