TRAVEL CENTER STORIES/TINY HOME LIVING
The Story of The Next Travel Center and the New Unpleasantness We Faced
The unpleasantness was avoidable and could’ve been better evaluated but they decided to go for it anyway
First off, what is a travel center?
Before I start this story, I’ve had a few readers ask me what a travel center is. This is mostly from those who are from overseas and in other countries. A simple explanation is that it’s truly a North American creation. It’s where trucks and travelers stop overnight and sometimes longer to sleep and also have access to restaurants, food, a travel store, showers, and laundry.
Truck drivers are given a certain amount of time that they are legally allowed to drive in a given amount of time to deliver goods so they have to stop and do all of their business somewhere. These are those places. Travelers are also welcome here.
Paying customers typically don’t run into problems, capitalism and all, right?
Okay, now that I’ve established what it is. In America, it just depends on where you are as to how long you’re allowed to stay at one of these. In the last place, since they were never too busy, they were fine with us staying there for about 3 1/2 months, especially since we were paying customers, and having us in the corner under a tree in an undesirable spot was already inconveniencing us a bit.
This isn’t the typical experience but it really depends. Typically, in many of these, as long as you’re spending tons of money there, they don’t push you out.
Spending a decent amount of money in a short amount of time but…
It’s only been about a few hours since we left the Love’s today. We had a mostly-pleasant experience at the Love’s Travel Stop in Ripley, NY. That was until we were going into our third day there. We had already spent two overnights there. We had spent over $200 in a short time knowing that showing an interest in making the place money usually plays well in the management of a travel center regardless of your intended stay.
Our plan is to limit any future travel center stays to three days maximum, particularly because we want to travel but in this specific case, we were just trying to wait out a severe storm. I had even told the lot attendant that that was our intention. He was sent out there on Sunday morning to relay the news that because they weren’t set up for paid RV spots yet. This would imply that since they couldn’t formally charge us for parking, we would have to leave.
Your fault, but I can’t stay?
What the heck? They were only set up for one overnight per vehicle but they hadn’t posted it anywhere and we weren’t told anything about this. So, in this new place, we were just going off of habit and respecting our area. We didn’t even take up more than one spot. We easily fit into the corner spot in the auto area.
Would he have said the same thing if we had gotten ourselves into the back with the big rigs? I know that truck drivers would’ve probably been perturbed by this intrusion but I’m sure they couldn’t say anything at that point. The thing is, we showered, ate many meals, did our laundry, and kindly patronized the store just enough. We even let one of the employees know what our plan was beforehand.
Management needed to take more time on our specific situation, they knew…
And still, management was stuck on saying that they were being kind by letting people stay even just one night without having the system in place to charge the $10 per day they are planning to charge RVs in the spots once they have it all set up.
Kind? We were kind to decide to patronize such a place for more than one night. I had asked the kid who had disturbed our perfect morning after we had purchased food and fuel from the store if we had already had the payment in place, if our plan had been just fine, he said it would’ve been.
We could’ve stayed our planned amount of time if they had a way to formally charge us
Well, what the actual hell?! He would’ve been fine with us paying exactly $30 to spend three nights there in an RV spot with the payment and hookups set up but us paying more than that and staying out of the way and only taking up one auto spot wasn’t, just because they weren’t ready?
Can someone explain the logic to me here? Am I missing something? He even relayed to us some weird story about an abandoned car they had dropped off in their lot a little bit ago that was involved in a crime as if that had anything to do with us parking our tiny home/RV/camper in a spot at a travel center.
Wanted to slam receipts but left anyway; camping is more adventurous
I realize and know that kid was nice and he was just following managerial direction but he needs better training and so does this manager who took issue with our specific situation. I saved all of the receipts in case we would run into this and I had them ready to go. I was about ready to slam all of them on the counter at this particular manager myself but we decided against confronting them, especially after the last situation we were in.
So, I obliged, we drove off and we went to give our business to a better place. We ended up at a beautiful lakeside campground just two miles down the road. We have breathtaking views of the lake and access to all of the places close to where we were. It’s just that this time the travel center won’t even sniff our business even while we’re still close.
Little hard feelings…and a pending Google review
There are no hard feelings but I’ll need a minute to even come back there. I’ve also filed a well-worded and polite email to their corporate offices about the incident. I’m sure that Love’s wouldn’t like that kind of press for their business and will address this accordingly.
My Google review, however, unsurprisingly, is pending and will probably take days if not weeks to approve or they will just leave it in limbo. I will actually share my campground trip with everyone here as we will be here for the next five days. Until next time, Digital Global Travelers.
