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April 07, 2009
Showered with praise
shower head droplets 02, originally uploaded by crmel_alexis.
Those who know me, know I love taking showers. I could stand in there all day, and often do. But, today, I had to take a shower in a most atypical place: a truck stop off the Interstate in Tennessee.
If you've been following along, I went for a run in Knoxville, then had to eventually scoot back to Nashville for my flight home. I figured I'd do my fellow passengers a service, and freshen up - but where to do that?
Yes! The Pilot Station. Road warriors, such as truckers, know that the Pilot Station is a beacon for all your road-warrior needs. When I was younger, my older brother used to go to school in Columbus, and he would carpool to get there. The drop-off and pick-up point was a Pilot Station halfway between Lancaster and Columbus, so I became quite familiar with it.
They had everything a trucker, or wanna-be trucker like most 10 year old boys, could want. Atlases; CB radios; TV's for your car; George Strait CD's. Those mudflaps with the silhouette of the naked woman. I mean, it was a veritable paradise of possibilities.
But it also focused on the mundane - the restaurant at that Pilot was reputed to have some of the best steak in Central Ohio. All for $3.99 including a potato! The thing I remember the most about the restaurant - we didn't eat there much - was that every table had a payphone next to it.
Apparently it also had showers. Truckers are human, and like any human, we want to be clean. This isn't Bastogne. It's bad enough being trapped in a vehicle for thousands of miles, but you gotta reek, too? Nevertheless, the truck stop shower did not sound like the ideal place for me to hang out.
So, with trepidation, I went into the Pilot Station and told the cashier - who, by the way, was the first hot cashier I've ever seen in my decades of going to truck stops - "I'd like to use one of the showers, please."
She told me that the system was down, and nobody could use the showers, even the ones at the truck stop down the road. I asked her why this was, and she told me that the computer was down, that keeps track of frequent customer reward points. I told her that I wasn't a frequent customer, I just need to take a shower and I was going to pay cash.
I haven't decided yet if I should take it as an insult, or compliment, that I was mistaken for a truck driver. It is probably an insult.
The shower actually cost me $10 to use, so I was hoping for at least something nice. The verdict? A-okay by me. Granted, it's not the Four Seasons, but it's not an outhouse either. The room was clean, it smelled nice, I had a fresh towel, and pleasant muzak in the background. Now, here I am, at the Nashville airport, all spic and span.
Although I have no real plan to become a frequent user of truck stop showers, it is a good option in case you are ever on the road and need to get clean. Putting pornographic mudflaps on a truck can get messy.
entry no. 1348
Posted at April 7, 2009 05:56 PM