I wouldn’t not generally suggest sending grandmas off alone in the dark in an Uber through a desolate area. It seems they get nervous about this sort of thing. And, while we are at it, apparently so do Uber drivers.
In celebration of my sister Lisa’s 40th birthday, both my sisters and I were driving from Cincinnati to Knoxville, Tennessee to pick up our Mom from the airport and then continuing the hour or so from there to the Mountain Harbor Inn, a lovely resort on Douglas Lake in Tennessee. The problem is that it was Memorial Day Weekend, so, due to the volume of traffic, what should have been a 4-hour drive turned into a 7-hour drive, leaving my mom stranded and waiting for us at a small local airport in which everything was closed by 8pm. We were in phone contact with mom, and as she described the small, empty, closed, airport, we decided to go ahead and call an Uber to get her to the resort where she could at least get to somewhere populated instead of wandering around like the last person in Knoxville for the next two hours. Mom agreed. Now sadly, there have been cases of women getting into an Uber alone and ending up a tragic statistic. We were sending mom into an Uber alone at closed airport at night to take her on a 45-minute drive to an isolated resort.
Safety and Comfort Rating: low.
My sisters and I had decided on a plan – keep Mom on the phone and make sure the Uber driver knows that we are tracking their every move.
However, confidence in our plan dropped a bit when it turned out that the Uber driver, Ammar, did not know where the Mountain Harbor Inn resort was.
Safety and Comfort Rating for Mom dialed down a little bit.
After about 10 minutes of Ammar trying to figure out the location of the resort on his map, I felt a little better. I mean, that’s quite a bit of time commitment and brain power for someone who is just going to turn down a random dark road to kill a grandma. My sister Lisa assumed command for operation “Don’t Let Mom Get Murdered on my Birthday Trip” and relayed our plan via the phone to our mom. Mom was skeptical.
Mom became more skeptical as the driver turned off the highway and onto a random dark road. Lisa went into GPS mapping mode like a steely NASA worker calmly crunching the numbers while watching life support data come back from Apollo 13. She assured mom that the random dark road was indeed on the route to the Inn. My sisters and Mom kept up conversation the entire route, my mom describing all that she could make out along the dark route; no houses to be seen, except for an occasional ramshackle one with what looked like a perpetual yard sale out front. No businesses except for one bar with a blinking Bud Light sign. Ammar, for his part, who apparently did not have grandma murder on his mind, was actually a little nervous about this ride as well. None of the roads en route to the resort looked alive.
Safety and Comfort rating low. For Ammar.
After an hour of driving, Ammar was just as perplexed as my mom by the rough and abandoned surroundings as they arrived at the entrance to the resort which was seemingly closed. Knoxville’s outlying areas are not the big city, folks. The office was locked, not many lights on, no apparent activity nearby, but there was an envelope on the door with the room key in it. Ammar actually offered to stay a minute to make sure she got to her room, probably in disbelief that this woman’s children would send her alone to this remote and seemingly closed Inn.
After another hour or so, my sisters and I arrived to find our mom in a cheerfully lit suite at the charming Mountain Harbor Inn, our mom neither abandoned at an empty airport nor murdered on a rural Tennessee back road after getting into a car with a man she did not know.
Safety and Comfort rating: high.
Fifty State Family 