As I get older, more family members die. Sadly, a great uncle who lived in Montgomery, Alabama recently died and I went to his funeral. He was an Episcopalian and the priest did a shoddy job, surely the product of his exiguous homiletic skill. The hymns were nice, the readings beautiful. The sermon, though, focused much too much on my great uncle and far too little on the hope in the resurrection. A funeral without that Easter focus has as much purpose as a wooden frying pan.

On the way up, we stopped at a little restaurant whose name I got by searching the Food Forum. I'd never been up that way before, so a recommendation was in order. I was happy to find that Bates Turkey House was right off I65, one of the most desolate stretches of interstate I've ever traveled east of the Mississippi.

We pulled into the poorly paved parking lot, sandwiched between disgusting gas stations and convenience stores and cheap roadside chain hotels. It's not much to look at on the outside with its tacky name plastered on its cheap roofing. There is a pointless dual entrance vestibule before you enter the actual restaurant, if you can call it that.

There's not much positive about Alabama I can say after this visit. To be fair, there wasn't a whole lot of positive to say before this visit either. That aristocratic, genteel mythology Alabamans feign is a charade. There are no women in hoop dresses; men do not open the doors for women nor do they wear suits or speak with refinement. No, the women I saw wore cheaply monogrammed XXL t-shirts with their initials on it. The men wore overalls that could fit a hippopotamus and donned trucker hats. People from Louisiana may jokingly smell like corndogs, but the Alabama patrons smelled like manure. Whatever good about Southern culture ever existed did not show itself to me on my trip. Strip malls, rude driving, obesity, and general slothfulness is the latticework of Alabama culture nowadays.

You order at the front counter. The menu is labeled on a plastic board behind them. There's not a lot on the menu: turkey sandwiches and turkey plates. There are a good number of side items, such as green beans, cole slaw, fries, butter beans, cranberry mush, and a few others I can't remember. Each turkey plate comes with a side of cranberry sauce, your choice of two sides , and dressing covered in turkey giblet gravy. The counter server said the gravy isn't made with giblets, though. Unannounced is that if you order your dressing on the side, they charge you $1.50 extra. Why? Alabama rules.

The interior is as cheaply made as the exterior. 1970s fake wood paneling is a perfect companion to the dirty floors and cheap, waxy chairs that have decades of Alabama grit and grime layered atop. There is the hum of annoying, cheaply piped in music.

The food is heated up and they call you to the counter to pick up the food. The turkey plate is about $9 and comes with appx 4oz of turkey. The turkey is good and comes from the restaurant's own turkey farms. The lady said the turkey was never frozen, but I really don't care if it's fresh or frozen. This tasted no better nor worse than a large no-name brand 39 cents per pound frozen turkey you get on sale in the pre-Thanksgiving turkey sales.. Like most turkey, it's a little dry, but turkey's nature is that of dry, lean white meat. It's good a few times a year, but you don't make a habit of it. The cranberry sauce tasted out of a can. The butter beans were actually lima beans and tasted like the frozen ones we eat at Thanksgiving. The candied yams I got had a bit too much cinnamon, but were adequate. The cornbread and rolls were terrible.

All in all, it was an average Thanksgiving meal served on throw away plates. The disposable plastic ware and plates crowned the feeling of being invited over by obese Alabama regulars to their dolled up trailer park. Don't ever take a food recommendation from the user shipshoal, as he was the one who recommended this below average truck stop quality experience. I was disappointed when we passed a Godfather's Pizza just 15 miles north. It would have been much better than Bates House of Turkey.

On the way back we stayed for a couple of nights at Grand Hotel in Point Clear. As this is the Food Board, I won't go into great detail except to say this is the most overrated and overpriced resort in the South. I remember staying here as a child and thinking it was great because there was a ton to do. As an adult, it is nothing special. At $500 plus all the resort fees and taxes, which brought my room cost to nearly $700 nightly, it simply wasn't worth it. The lobby is small, unimpressive and its recent modern renovation does not fit the character of the grounds at all. The rooms were okay. My TV never worked. They even sent a man to fix it, but he couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work, so I was left to read for both evenings. The food was okay, but as expected, far more expensive than what it is worth.

I really had high hopes for Grand Hotel, partly by what I'd read on the Travel Board. But it was a big disappointment. Although in the same price range as Four Seasons in Jackson Hole and Orlando, those resorts are several echelons higher than Grand Hotel. The cookies they give out after that obnoxious cannon fire aren't even very good. How bad is that? Anyway, I won't belabor my undressing of the Grand Hotel. I won't be planning any return trips, that's for sure.