Name's Ed. Everybody calls me Big Ed on account of I am. I drive a tractor-trailer for a living, dry van mostly, out of northwest Ohio, and my regular run is out I-80 to California and back, or down through I-40 when the dispatcher feels like it or the weather over Wyoming doesn't. Been doing it since 1977. About 2.4 million miles, give or take, no chargeable accidents, and I would like to keep it that way, so pay attention to the part about four-wheelers.

My daughter set this page up for me on her computer at college and showed me how to type into it. I'm slow at it. I write these up in the truck on a legal pad and type them in when I'm home, which is about four days a month. So if it says "last updated" a while back, I'm not dead, I'm in Nebraska.

Why write reviews of truck stops? Because nobody else does, not honestly. The magazines review the ones that buy ads. I review the ones I actually stopped at, and I tell you if the shower had a curtain. I don't take a dime from any of them. All the truck stops on this page are ones I've stopped at, in the towns I say they're in. I've left off the chain names on purpose because I'm not looking for a lawyer, and a truck stop can change hands and go downhill in a year anyway. Go by the town and my description and you'll find it.

Four things matter. Each one gets 1 to 5. I add them up. 20 is perfect; I have never given a 20 and I don't expect to.

Westbound order. The way I drive it.

Youngstown, Ohio — the big one by the state line, north side.
Showers 4 · Coffee 3 · Parking 2 · Pie 4  =  13
Showers are new since '97, tile, real towels. Lot is a zoo after 7 p.m. because every driver out of Pennsylvania wants to get across the line before he shuts down. Cherry pie is made in the back by a woman named Dot who's been there longer than me. Coffee's just coffee.

Toledo, Ohio — my home stop, out by the turnpike interchange.
Showers 3 · Coffee 4 · Parking 4 · Pie 3  =  14
I'm biased. Nobody in the lot bothers you, the lot's paved and lit, and the night man makes a fresh pot when he sees my truck come in. Showers are older but clean. Pie's from a truck. It's home.

Elkhart, Indiana — the one with the big yellow sign.
Showers 2 · Coffee 2 · Parking 3 · Pie 1  =  8
No pie. NO PIE. What kind of an outfit. Shower had no curtain and the drain was slow. Coffee had been on the burner since the Carter administration. The only reason I stop is it's exactly where my hours run out on a bad day. Been going downhill since new owners.

Joliet, Illinois — south of the interchange, the one with the tire shop.
Showers 4 · Coffee 4 · Parking 2 · Pie 3  =  13
Good clean place, the problem is Chicago. Everybody's trying to get around Chicago and this lot is full by 6 p.m. If you can get in, it's a good night. Waitress named Bernice runs the counter and doesn't put up with anything.

Des Moines, Iowa — east side, the two-story one.
Showers 5 · Coffee 4 · Parking 4 · Pie 5  =  18
Best on the whole run. Showers are private rooms with a door, a sink and a chair to put your clothes on. Somebody thought about it. The pie case has nine kinds and the sour cream raisin is the best pie I have eaten in a truck stop in my life and I've been at this since '77. Lot's big and the reefers park on their own side so you don't hear them run all night. If I could get my hours to end here every trip I would.

Grand Island, Nebraska — the one at the exit with the water tower.
Showers 3 · Coffee 5 · Parking 4 · Pie 4  =  16
Coffee 5 because it's the only place I know that's fresh at 3 a.m. every time, no exceptions. They put a pot on every 20 minutes and pour the old one out. Rhubarb pie in season. Big gravel lot, well lit, nobody bothers you. The showers are fine, they're just not the Des Moines showers.

Cheyenne, Wyoming — east side, right before the hill.
Showers 3 · Coffee 3 · Parking 5 · Pie 2  =  13
The lot goes on forever and you can always get in, which matters in Wyoming when the wind's blowing 50 and the interstate closes ahead of you. I've spent two days here waiting on I-80 to open. Pie's from a box. The chili is good and I'm not rating chili but it's good.

Rawlins, Wyoming
Showers 2 · Coffee 3 · Parking 3 · Pie 2  =  10
Fuel and go. Shower water comes out brown for the first minute. Nice people, though, and they'll tell you the truth about the road ahead, which in Wyoming is worth more than pie.

Wendover, Utah — on the salt flats side of the line.
Showers 4 · Coffee 3 · Parking 3 · Pie 3  =  13
Last stop before Nevada. Clean, and the showers are good. You'll notice everybody gets real interested in walking across the state line after supper; I don't gamble, I go to bed. Pie's fine. The view out the window at sunrise, with the salt going white all the way to the mountains, is the best thing about the whole trip and it's free.

Reno, Nevada — east side.
Showers 3 · Coffee 2 · Parking 2 · Pie 1  =  8
Slot machines where the pie case ought to be. That tells you everything.

Sacramento, California — the one off the loop, north side.
Showers 4 · Coffee 4 · Parking 2 · Pie 3  =  13
End of the line. Clean and busy. You'll pay California prices for everything. Parking's tight because everybody's waiting on a load. They have a fruit pie made with real California peaches in the summer that I'd give a 4 in July and a 2 in January.

When Wyoming's shut or the load goes to Los Angeles, I drop down and take 40 across. Old Route 66 runs right alongside most of it, which is how I ended up in this neighborhood. Ran this way twice in September; here's what's new.

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma — west side, by the big interchange.
Showers 4 · Coffee 4 · Parking 3 · Pie 4  =  15
Good all around. Pecan pie that's mostly pecans, which is how it should be. Lot's lit up like a ball park. Showers clean, short wait.

Amarillo, Texas — east side, the one with the big steer out front.
Showers 3 · Coffee 4 · Parking 4 · Pie 3  =  14
Everybody stops in Amarillo. It's where the hours run out coming from either direction. The restaurant will sell you a steak the size of a hubcap, and the pie's an afterthought, but the coffee's strong and the lot is huge and paved. Showers are a little tired.

Tucumcari, New Mexico
Showers 4 · Coffee 3 · Parking 3 · Pie 5  =  15
Pie 5. A lady makes them at home and brings them in every morning in a station wagon, six or seven of them, and when they're gone they're gone. Apple with a lattice top. I've changed my schedule to make Tucumcari by 10 a.m. and I'm not ashamed. Nice old town with the neon motel signs still going along the old road, if you like that kind of thing, and I do.

Gallup, New Mexico
Showers 2 · Coffee 3 · Parking 4 · Pie 2  =  11
Big lot, nothing special. Showers need work. The green chile on everything is good if you're ready for it and a surprise if you're not.

Holbrook, Arizona
Showers 3 · Coffee 4 · Parking 3 · Pie 3  =  13
Decent. Coffee's fresh. Petrified wood for sale at the counter, which I've never understood but somebody buys it. Cold at night up here even in September; it's high desert.

Kingman, Arizona
Showers 4 · Coffee 3 · Parking 4 · Pie 2  =  13
Last good stop before the desert. Clean showers, big lot. Fuel up here; it only gets more expensive. Pie is the plastic-wedge kind.

Barstow, California
Showers 3 · Coffee 2 · Parking 2 · Pie 2  =  9
Hot, crowded, and 115 degrees in the lot in August. Everybody's out of hours at Barstow at the same time. It's not the place's fault, exactly, but the coffee is. Get in, get your shower, get out at 4 a.m. before the heat.

A four-wheeler is you, in your car. Nothing personal. Here's what I need you to know, and I'm asking nice.

1. I can't stop. Loaded, I weigh 80,000 pounds. At 60 miles an hour it takes me the length of a football field and then some to get stopped, on dry pavement, on a good day. When you pull in front of me and hit your brakes for your exit, you are betting your family's life that I've got that much room. Most days I do. Don't bet on the other days.
2. If you can't see my mirrors, I can't see you. There's a blind spot on my right side big enough to hide a school bus, another one right behind the trailer, and one right in front of the hood. Don't ride there. Pass me or fall back, but don't live in my blind spot.
3. Pass on the left, and get it done. Don't hang next to my trailer for three miles. If a tire lets go, you're where the pieces land.
4. Wide right turns. When I've got my right blinker on at an intersection and I'm swinging out to the left, that's not an invitation to squeeze up the inside. The trailer is about to be where you are.
5. Flash your lights. When a truck passes you and you flash your headlights, that tells him his trailer's clear and he can come back over. He'll blink his marker lights at you to say thanks. That's the whole conversation, and it's a nice one.
6. Merging: I'll make room if I can, but I can't always. If you're coming down the on-ramp, match the traffic, and if I'm there, it's easier for you to slow down than for me to move 80,000 pounds into the left lane.
7. Fog, snow, rain: back off. The spray off my trailer will blind you. Hang back where you can see.
8. At the truck stop, don't park in the truck spots. I know it's late and it's close to the door. That spot is somebody's bedroom for the night, and he's been driving ten hours to get to it.

Do those eight things and every driver out here will look out for you. Most of us have kids in cars too.

People ask why I can't just drive on through. Federal rules, and they're the same ones we've had for a long, long time:

• After 8 hours off duty, I can drive up to 10 hours.
• I can't drive at all after being on duty 15 hours (driving, fueling, waiting at a dock, it all counts) until I've had 8 off again.
• And there's a weekly limit: 60 hours in 7 days, or 70 in 8 for outfits that run every day, like mine.

Every bit of it goes in the logbook — a paper book with a grid, a line for driving, a line for on duty, a line for the sleeper and a line for off duty. We call it the comic book. Any officer at any scale house can ask to see it, and yes, they check. I'm not going to tell you nobody ever fudges a log; I'm going to tell you I'm 53 with a bad back and I don't need to prove anything to anybody, and tired drivers kill people. When the ten hours are up I'm done, and I've planned my day so that when they're up I'm pulling into one of the places on this list and not the shoulder.

That's why the truck stop matters. It's not a gas station to me. It's where I live five nights a week.

Yes, we still use the CB. It's not the movies, but it's still the best way to find out what's ahead of you, and it's still how you get told there's a cop over the hill.

• Channel 19 is the road channel, where the trucks talk. Channel 9 is for emergencies, and only emergencies; don't chat on it.
• You don't need a handle, but most guys have one. Mine's Big Ed, which is also just my name, so I saved myself some trouble.
• Ask, don't holler. "Anybody got a bear report westbound out of Cheyenne, come on?" Somebody'll answer.
• Say thanks. "Preciate it, driver."
• Don't key the mike over another man. Wait till he's done.
• Don't tie up 19 with your life story. Take it to another channel.
• Don't cuss on the air. There are kids listening in the campers and there are ladies driving trucks, more every year, and anyway your mother's listening somewhere.
• If a driver's telling you about a wreck or a closure ahead, let him finish. That's information that keeps people alive.
• The lingo: a "bear" is a policeman, "smokey" the same, a "four-wheeler" is you, a "chicken coop" is a weigh station, a "bear in the air" is a police airplane clocking traffic, and "come back" means say again. You don't have to use any of it. Plain English works fine.

I'll tell you how it goes, since people ask.

The truck is a '96 conventional with a big sleeper, which is a bed, a little cabinet, a 12-volt cooler, a reading light, and a picture of my wife and the kids taped to the wall. I've got a little TV that runs off the cigarette lighter. I've got a box of paperback westerns I trade at the truck stops; you leave one, you take one. I've got a CB, an AM radio for the ball game, and a tape deck. Country, mostly. Some Merle.

Calling home. Every truck stop has a bank of pay phones in the driver's lounge, and every night about 9 my time I'm on one of them with a calling card, hollering over the video games to ask my wife how her day went and whether the furnace guy came. I call my daughter at college on Sundays. Some of the younger drivers have got the cellular phones now and I suppose that's coming for all of us, but half the places I stop there's no signal anyway, and a pay phone's never dropped a call on me. There's something about standing at that phone with a cup of coffee, tired, and hearing the dog bark in the background at home. I'm not a poet. But there is.

Eating. Truck stop food'll kill you if you let it. I let it for about fifteen years. Now I keep fruit in the cooler and I get the chef's salad more than I get the chicken fried steak, and I walk around the lot for twenty minutes before I turn in. That's my whole program and I've lost 30 pounds since '97. Pie's the one thing I won't give up. A man needs one thing.

Sleeping. You learn to sleep with reefers running next to you and somebody's air brakes going off at 3 a.m. You learn which lots are quiet. You learn to put the curtain up and turn on the little fan. First couple years I didn't sleep. Now I sleep like a rock anywhere from Ohio to the ocean.

Home. Three, four days a month. Mow the grass, fix what broke, take the wife to dinner, sleep in a bed that doesn't move. Then the dispatcher calls. It's a hard life on a family and I won't pretty it up. But I've seen the sun come up over the salt flats and come down over the Mississippi in the same week, more times than I can count, and I got paid for it. There's worse jobs. Most of them are inside.

Be careful out there. Give us room. Eat the pie.

— Ed

• The Roadside Attraction Log — the Peabodys. I've passed most of those things at 65 miles an hour. They stop.
• Hank & Peggy's Great American Road Trip
• Neon Nights: Old Signs of the Mother Road — Tucumcari's in there, I bet.
• Motorcycle Touring Diary — different rig, same road.
• Walking the Dog, Losing the Weight — a fellow doing what I'm doing, with a dog instead of a parking lot.
• The Route66 neighborhood