Funny you should write this. Last weekend I drove from northern Virginia out to Blacksburg Virginia and was reminded of two things. 1 - how gorgeous Virginia is once you get out of the suburban sprawl and 2 - how great our rest stop game is. You pull over into a nice shaded area with clean bathrooms, picnic tables and sometimes even short little paths where you can stretch your legs. So much nicer than hopping off an exit hoping to find a restaurant or gas station within a couple of miles. I know there were some budget issues and some talk about privatizing them back around 2009 or so but luckily they have remained a publicly funded resource.
I always wonder if we did not have a history of public institutions like the library or post office if we’d be able to create them now. Hate that there is this wariness of government doing good.
I live in British Columbia and we also have a great rest stop game! They sound similar to VA’s: at least pit toilets but sometimes actual bathrooms, often picnic tables and garbage cans and grass. It always blows my mind when I visit other provinces and there just… aren’t any?!
This is so relevant to me. As a Forest Service recreation planner, I've struggled for years in an environment where education is not funded and there is disregard and hostility toward my agency. We have tried to work with communities to make connections with varying degrees of success. There should be corridors from towns to trails. There should be bathrooms...but who pays for cleaning those? I've done it...it's horrible. In my town there's often resentment toward tourists yet tourists allow us to have services we like. No answers here.
I live in WNC near a super popular through hike off the AT, Max Patch. It’s gorgeous year round and the views are freaking incredible. I moved here 7 years ago after a few vacations in the area with the desperate need to escape the Gulf Coast of FL.
My first time at this hike with friends I realized how bad I needed to pee. The drive in takes a bit, it’s a washboard road for miles so even if you prepared prior, once off the hike duty will call. So as I’m telling my friend how bad I need to go, another female tells me of “the spot”. She’s a regular. So I take my hiking towel used for quick bathroom trips into the woods and do in deed find the spot full of TP. It does appear to be bio degradable but still. I was annoyed. So I went back to the car and grabbed some gloves and a trash bag and picked it all up.
I’ve been back regularly since living here and bring supplies every time to pick up. But I’ve often thought how a porta potty might be beneficial here. The spot is right off the parking area and is a well known bathroom in the Great Smoky Mountains NP. As an annual park pass member, I’d pay extra for the maintenance of a porta potty in a place like this.
I live in a lovely small town in the SF Bay Area that has a climate that used to be so mild that many of our buildings and homes do not have AC. With the recent climate changes it now has entered the danger zone of summer heat. I am happy to notice that signage near the public library and several churches state that you are welcome to enjoy their quiet cooled spaces for respite. Our downtown historic buildings are also open to simply rest in and use the restrooms without charges. We do have clean public restrooms and water fountains easily accessible and most of our merchants are very welcoming to those needing a pit stop. We are just off a major highway that has no rest stops in our area. We are an official Tree City and are proud of our sweet town. If you are passing through the area near Benicia California take a moment to pause at one of our many public access water areas complete with trees and picnic tables.
I will certainly! Similarly in our neighboring town, there are fairly well maintained public restrooms, and the library is always there for respite from the storms. I got caught with the baby in a monsoon the other afternoon and ran the few blocks there only to find the lobby half full of other rain runners.
Gosh it’s nice to look forward to Sunday posts from you again. 🏔
I only hope that it doesn’t become too onerous with WWW’s needs. Any time you feel it’s too much, feel free to just post a “I need a time out this week”. Or just a photo of your luscious mountain environment. Or dogs/cats! How are those characters?
FWIW…💦 I have perfected the art of roadside urination by pulling off at an 11 o’clock angle, opening the right rear door, and perching on the running board. I don’t care if anyone knows what I am doing, just that it’s not visible. Never had to deal with #2 though… I am also driving solo.✨
All it takes is a couple ‘people’ doing ghastly things to a private restroom, or ODing in there, and owners will close them up.
I’ve never tried the hiker’s silver impregnated “Pee Cloths”; a zip lock bag is just fine for packing out TP for me, as I am only a day hiker.
My sympathies regarding the defilement of your local trails. Made me immediately think of the motion sensor wildlife cameras used by researchers. Bust somebody being a jerk and post it!
I just want to say thank you so much for lending me some grace in these early weeks/months back. I haven't slept seemingly at all and looking at the page glaring back at me feels like being questioned for a crime I can't remember if I committed or not.
One of the things I liked about driving the Alaska-Canada Highway is how common it was to find a place to use the restroom. It was often just a porta potty and a trash can in a pull-out, but there were many of them. It made it easy to take care of business and keep the car clean even in areas with no other services.
We just drove from Minnesota to western Virginia and back and were lamenting so many of the same things. So many gas stations we stopped at had signs saying the bathroom was "out of order," which definitely seemed like a permanent condition. I was longing to get back to the zone of Kwik Trip, a gas station in the upper Midwest that is always big and clean and has restrooms that are never closed... why is this a rarity rather than the standard when we are, as you said, such a car centric culture?
I'm writing an article on services along Interstate-80. I did a trip from Michigan to California and back this summer and was appalled at services (or lack of) and what a rip-off it is to stay in hotels and motels along the way. The average cost for a hotel room was $140 for one night, like six hours to be exact. And there's a trick to that. If you call to book ahead and go through reservations you will get jammed for another $60 plus. That's just the start of it. Car centric. I would like to borrow (or steal the word). It's so insane on how dependent we are on cars. There's no way around it. The country is too big to change. Another thing I noted was how many people were having to sit in odd places to recharge their Tesla autos. Another insanity if traveling from coast to coast. So much insanity and cost for so little offered.
Wow that sounds like a horrid trip. It’s been a number of years since I drove long distance, but it was never a problem to find a rest stop. It seems like things have changed!
This is amazing and very true. We went to Santa Fe two summers ago and it was nearly impossible to find a public restroom in the main tourist area in town, or even further away where the locals went, because of the unhouse population. Businesses had signs that restrooms were either unavailable or for customers only and the McDonald's locked their bathrooms and you had to go and get a key. We ended up at a grocery store a few miles away to use the restroom. I found this situation also pertained to gas stations in other towns in NM, too. They just put a sign up saying it was out of service or wasn't available for customers. Meanwhile, there's nowhere else to use the restroom on the side of the road for miles.
Some area of Austin are also doing this, too. No Public Restroom signs in gas stations.
It's so dehumanizing. I understand the trials — you don't want someone doing drugs or leaving a mess — but to deny everyone the ability to relieve themselves when to do so outside is illegal? It's just cruel.
We run into this in our tiny little town that gets a lot of thru-traffic including paddlers on the river. The town or conservation authority puts out portapotties, as does the local grocery store. Several of our businesses also get people coming in to use the toilets though I don’t notice it too much. Along the 401 in Ontario there’s now a lot of private owned rest stops with water filling stations and bathrooms. They have a couple chains inside and wifi so you can also do a work meeting. I used to stop at them frequently. I suspect that corridor gets more traffic than perhaps the route you were on tho so it pays to have them.
We recently travelled to Iceland and in more than one place there were public toilets but you paid for them. In a small community of like 200 people that probably gets millions of tourists a year, it seemed completely reasonable to me that we would pay. Sometimes I think we need a little reset in our mindset as tourists in this part of the world and our expectations around what should be free. At the end of the day someone has to pay, whether in taxes or user fees.
Love that. We joke locally about turning this road into a toll road, so it's the road itself people are using as recreation, but the logistics and shared domain across agencies make it nearly impossible. A girl can dream!
I found Torched, about LA and the upcoming Olympics on Threads (I think). And recently Alissa Walker wrote about shade, bus stops, and the hostile architecture of bus corridors in LA. https://www.torched.la/the-waiting-is-the-hardest-part/
When we drove from Santiago down to Patagonia, I was delighted to find that in Chile, they have amazing rest stops on their highways. With clean bathrooms (including showers), living walls, small restaurants, play areas for children. Families meet up there to have meals together. And like the US, towns are very spread out.
Just here to say we were recently in Scotland and found it delightful that all of the hiking trails go across private land and you're allowed to camp on any of it as long as you're not a nuisance. We ran into so many sheep and cattle (fluffy cows too). Of course the more popular places on social media were completely overrun by humans but wait for it to rain a bit or drive 5 miles further and it was as if we were the only people in the world. Made me think of all the ways towns in Colorado have tried to preserve open space to avoid it being privatized and developed. Meanwhile, my town in Virginia is so touristy there's often water fountains every 2-3 miles along the public bike path and as another commenter noted, our public rest stops in Virginia are pretty great.
The usual tourism trade-off is that in return for their (annoying) presence, they leave some money behind. This is surely true for you at the county level, just not your town. Ways to change that bring their own costs.
Just imagine what the Great American Desert (aka the Plains) was like before the railroad, when people crossed at walking speed in ox driven wagons.
We all run our modern lives, especially our 'vacations,' with insufficient slack built into the schedule to do things like get the AC fixed. The obvious solution -- do less, so there's enough time for that shit -- is pretty unattractive. Especially in your case, because it's not like you need the AC a whole lot anyway, and probably won't for many months yet. No answers here: I'd have done what you did (although my wife would have shown much less grace).
Well, to be abundantly fair to us, this was the third time we had the AC fixed. It was no longer a "stop in to a mechanic" issue — it had become a diagnostic nightmare that required specialized parts costing thousands of dollars that we no longer had. We tested the AC for an entire week after getting fixed. We also allowed ourselves four days to travel what we would've done in one pre-baby. So, the slack was deeply sufficient. The only thing insufficient was money.
If you're in the mood for a silly old story, read on. If not, on with your day!
Decades ago, when my wife was a schoolteacher and I was a water rights bureaucrat, she went to visit her parents in Germany for the summer, and I took a month off work to join her. She went before me, and was supposed to buy a used VW Beetle, which we were confident could be resold for the same amount at the end of the summer. She ended up buying an oldie, which was a 6 volt instead of a 12 volt. Car seemed fine, and we headed off on a road trip to Italy. In Switzerland, the solenoid went out, so we couldn't start the car, except by popping the clutch while rolling.
Dropped by a VW dealer in Florence, but because of the car's vintage, they thought it would take 4 weeks at least to get the part. So we went on, parking carefully, so I could always push the car. The thing was pretty light, and I could get it going fast enough on level ground, with some space. I'd be pushing the car, and young Italians came out of the woodwork to help. And showed genuine joy when it turned out that I'm American, and not German(as they'd thought from the license plates. We had short but enthusiastic conversations, as one does.
Went to Pompeii, Paestum, then southern Sicily. Then back up Italy. On a lark, we popped into a mechanic shop in San Marino: guy said it'd take 4 weeks to get the part, but he could make one in an hour. And so he did.
I like my Subaru a lot, and am not driving a 60s VW. But oh man have we lost something moving to the higher tech.
Love this story. Ben and I are deeply resistant to the seemingly guaranteed future where cars have to have giant screens in them. Long live Click and Clack!
Funny you should write this. Last weekend I drove from northern Virginia out to Blacksburg Virginia and was reminded of two things. 1 - how gorgeous Virginia is once you get out of the suburban sprawl and 2 - how great our rest stop game is. You pull over into a nice shaded area with clean bathrooms, picnic tables and sometimes even short little paths where you can stretch your legs. So much nicer than hopping off an exit hoping to find a restaurant or gas station within a couple of miles. I know there were some budget issues and some talk about privatizing them back around 2009 or so but luckily they have remained a publicly funded resource.
I always wonder if we did not have a history of public institutions like the library or post office if we’d be able to create them now. Hate that there is this wariness of government doing good.
That sounds so dreamy.
I live in British Columbia and we also have a great rest stop game! They sound similar to VA’s: at least pit toilets but sometimes actual bathrooms, often picnic tables and garbage cans and grass. It always blows my mind when I visit other provinces and there just… aren’t any?!
This is so relevant to me. As a Forest Service recreation planner, I've struggled for years in an environment where education is not funded and there is disregard and hostility toward my agency. We have tried to work with communities to make connections with varying degrees of success. There should be corridors from towns to trails. There should be bathrooms...but who pays for cleaning those? I've done it...it's horrible. In my town there's often resentment toward tourists yet tourists allow us to have services we like. No answers here.
Agree with all of this. And feel that resentment irony deeply.
I live in WNC near a super popular through hike off the AT, Max Patch. It’s gorgeous year round and the views are freaking incredible. I moved here 7 years ago after a few vacations in the area with the desperate need to escape the Gulf Coast of FL.
My first time at this hike with friends I realized how bad I needed to pee. The drive in takes a bit, it’s a washboard road for miles so even if you prepared prior, once off the hike duty will call. So as I’m telling my friend how bad I need to go, another female tells me of “the spot”. She’s a regular. So I take my hiking towel used for quick bathroom trips into the woods and do in deed find the spot full of TP. It does appear to be bio degradable but still. I was annoyed. So I went back to the car and grabbed some gloves and a trash bag and picked it all up.
I’ve been back regularly since living here and bring supplies every time to pick up. But I’ve often thought how a porta potty might be beneficial here. The spot is right off the parking area and is a well known bathroom in the Great Smoky Mountains NP. As an annual park pass member, I’d pay extra for the maintenance of a porta potty in a place like this.
We should all stand and applaud you. Picking up other people's toilet paper gets a humanitarian award.
I felt the same way when I saw/read you were using cloth diapers. LOL I couldn’t bare it, (tried and failed) with two kids. Funny/ironic right?
To be fair, we haven't made it to solids yet. 😘
I live in a lovely small town in the SF Bay Area that has a climate that used to be so mild that many of our buildings and homes do not have AC. With the recent climate changes it now has entered the danger zone of summer heat. I am happy to notice that signage near the public library and several churches state that you are welcome to enjoy their quiet cooled spaces for respite. Our downtown historic buildings are also open to simply rest in and use the restrooms without charges. We do have clean public restrooms and water fountains easily accessible and most of our merchants are very welcoming to those needing a pit stop. We are just off a major highway that has no rest stops in our area. We are an official Tree City and are proud of our sweet town. If you are passing through the area near Benicia California take a moment to pause at one of our many public access water areas complete with trees and picnic tables.
I will certainly! Similarly in our neighboring town, there are fairly well maintained public restrooms, and the library is always there for respite from the storms. I got caught with the baby in a monsoon the other afternoon and ran the few blocks there only to find the lobby half full of other rain runners.
Gosh it’s nice to look forward to Sunday posts from you again. 🏔
I only hope that it doesn’t become too onerous with WWW’s needs. Any time you feel it’s too much, feel free to just post a “I need a time out this week”. Or just a photo of your luscious mountain environment. Or dogs/cats! How are those characters?
FWIW…💦 I have perfected the art of roadside urination by pulling off at an 11 o’clock angle, opening the right rear door, and perching on the running board. I don’t care if anyone knows what I am doing, just that it’s not visible. Never had to deal with #2 though… I am also driving solo.✨
All it takes is a couple ‘people’ doing ghastly things to a private restroom, or ODing in there, and owners will close them up.
I’ve never tried the hiker’s silver impregnated “Pee Cloths”; a zip lock bag is just fine for packing out TP for me, as I am only a day hiker.
My sympathies regarding the defilement of your local trails. Made me immediately think of the motion sensor wildlife cameras used by researchers. Bust somebody being a jerk and post it!
I just want to say thank you so much for lending me some grace in these early weeks/months back. I haven't slept seemingly at all and looking at the page glaring back at me feels like being questioned for a crime I can't remember if I committed or not.
One of the things I liked about driving the Alaska-Canada Highway is how common it was to find a place to use the restroom. It was often just a porta potty and a trash can in a pull-out, but there were many of them. It made it easy to take care of business and keep the car clean even in areas with no other services.
I wonder who manages them?
We just drove from Minnesota to western Virginia and back and were lamenting so many of the same things. So many gas stations we stopped at had signs saying the bathroom was "out of order," which definitely seemed like a permanent condition. I was longing to get back to the zone of Kwik Trip, a gas station in the upper Midwest that is always big and clean and has restrooms that are never closed... why is this a rarity rather than the standard when we are, as you said, such a car centric culture?
I'm writing an article on services along Interstate-80. I did a trip from Michigan to California and back this summer and was appalled at services (or lack of) and what a rip-off it is to stay in hotels and motels along the way. The average cost for a hotel room was $140 for one night, like six hours to be exact. And there's a trick to that. If you call to book ahead and go through reservations you will get jammed for another $60 plus. That's just the start of it. Car centric. I would like to borrow (or steal the word). It's so insane on how dependent we are on cars. There's no way around it. The country is too big to change. Another thing I noted was how many people were having to sit in odd places to recharge their Tesla autos. Another insanity if traveling from coast to coast. So much insanity and cost for so little offered.
I'm always voting for the people trying to improve our infrastructure. If only!
Wow that sounds like a horrid trip. It’s been a number of years since I drove long distance, but it was never a problem to find a rest stop. It seems like things have changed!
This is amazing and very true. We went to Santa Fe two summers ago and it was nearly impossible to find a public restroom in the main tourist area in town, or even further away where the locals went, because of the unhouse population. Businesses had signs that restrooms were either unavailable or for customers only and the McDonald's locked their bathrooms and you had to go and get a key. We ended up at a grocery store a few miles away to use the restroom. I found this situation also pertained to gas stations in other towns in NM, too. They just put a sign up saying it was out of service or wasn't available for customers. Meanwhile, there's nowhere else to use the restroom on the side of the road for miles.
Some area of Austin are also doing this, too. No Public Restroom signs in gas stations.
It's a problem!
It's so dehumanizing. I understand the trials — you don't want someone doing drugs or leaving a mess — but to deny everyone the ability to relieve themselves when to do so outside is illegal? It's just cruel.
We run into this in our tiny little town that gets a lot of thru-traffic including paddlers on the river. The town or conservation authority puts out portapotties, as does the local grocery store. Several of our businesses also get people coming in to use the toilets though I don’t notice it too much. Along the 401 in Ontario there’s now a lot of private owned rest stops with water filling stations and bathrooms. They have a couple chains inside and wifi so you can also do a work meeting. I used to stop at them frequently. I suspect that corridor gets more traffic than perhaps the route you were on tho so it pays to have them.
We recently travelled to Iceland and in more than one place there were public toilets but you paid for them. In a small community of like 200 people that probably gets millions of tourists a year, it seemed completely reasonable to me that we would pay. Sometimes I think we need a little reset in our mindset as tourists in this part of the world and our expectations around what should be free. At the end of the day someone has to pay, whether in taxes or user fees.
Love that. We joke locally about turning this road into a toll road, so it's the road itself people are using as recreation, but the logistics and shared domain across agencies make it nearly impossible. A girl can dream!
I found Torched, about LA and the upcoming Olympics on Threads (I think). And recently Alissa Walker wrote about shade, bus stops, and the hostile architecture of bus corridors in LA. https://www.torched.la/the-waiting-is-the-hardest-part/
So happy to not be in LA for these Olympics.
When we drove from Santiago down to Patagonia, I was delighted to find that in Chile, they have amazing rest stops on their highways. With clean bathrooms (including showers), living walls, small restaurants, play areas for children. Families meet up there to have meals together. And like the US, towns are very spread out.
Googling how they do this now
I suspect it is privatized. In fact I'm almost sure it was. COPEC ran them and they are a gas company.
Just here to say we were recently in Scotland and found it delightful that all of the hiking trails go across private land and you're allowed to camp on any of it as long as you're not a nuisance. We ran into so many sheep and cattle (fluffy cows too). Of course the more popular places on social media were completely overrun by humans but wait for it to rain a bit or drive 5 miles further and it was as if we were the only people in the world. Made me think of all the ways towns in Colorado have tried to preserve open space to avoid it being privatized and developed. Meanwhile, my town in Virginia is so touristy there's often water fountains every 2-3 miles along the public bike path and as another commenter noted, our public rest stops in Virginia are pretty great.
The right to walk in many European countries is *incredible* and it's heartbreaking we don't allow it here through the huge swaths of private land.
The usual tourism trade-off is that in return for their (annoying) presence, they leave some money behind. This is surely true for you at the county level, just not your town. Ways to change that bring their own costs.
Just imagine what the Great American Desert (aka the Plains) was like before the railroad, when people crossed at walking speed in ox driven wagons.
We all run our modern lives, especially our 'vacations,' with insufficient slack built into the schedule to do things like get the AC fixed. The obvious solution -- do less, so there's enough time for that shit -- is pretty unattractive. Especially in your case, because it's not like you need the AC a whole lot anyway, and probably won't for many months yet. No answers here: I'd have done what you did (although my wife would have shown much less grace).
Well, to be abundantly fair to us, this was the third time we had the AC fixed. It was no longer a "stop in to a mechanic" issue — it had become a diagnostic nightmare that required specialized parts costing thousands of dollars that we no longer had. We tested the AC for an entire week after getting fixed. We also allowed ourselves four days to travel what we would've done in one pre-baby. So, the slack was deeply sufficient. The only thing insufficient was money.
Oof! Modern technology makes everything costlier.
If you're in the mood for a silly old story, read on. If not, on with your day!
Decades ago, when my wife was a schoolteacher and I was a water rights bureaucrat, she went to visit her parents in Germany for the summer, and I took a month off work to join her. She went before me, and was supposed to buy a used VW Beetle, which we were confident could be resold for the same amount at the end of the summer. She ended up buying an oldie, which was a 6 volt instead of a 12 volt. Car seemed fine, and we headed off on a road trip to Italy. In Switzerland, the solenoid went out, so we couldn't start the car, except by popping the clutch while rolling.
Dropped by a VW dealer in Florence, but because of the car's vintage, they thought it would take 4 weeks at least to get the part. So we went on, parking carefully, so I could always push the car. The thing was pretty light, and I could get it going fast enough on level ground, with some space. I'd be pushing the car, and young Italians came out of the woodwork to help. And showed genuine joy when it turned out that I'm American, and not German(as they'd thought from the license plates. We had short but enthusiastic conversations, as one does.
Went to Pompeii, Paestum, then southern Sicily. Then back up Italy. On a lark, we popped into a mechanic shop in San Marino: guy said it'd take 4 weeks to get the part, but he could make one in an hour. And so he did.
I like my Subaru a lot, and am not driving a 60s VW. But oh man have we lost something moving to the higher tech.
Love this story. Ben and I are deeply resistant to the seemingly guaranteed future where cars have to have giant screens in them. Long live Click and Clack!