Headed for truck shows, searching for clean restrooms

This summer is very different from last summer, when coronavirus restrictions closed restaurants and restroom facilities everywhere and truck drivers were hailed as heroes.

This summer the COVID-19 restrictions are being lifted, and the trucker hero talk has stopped.

Returning to normal is mostly welcome, but in one way it isn’t – clean showers on the road, said Marty Ellis, skipper of OOIDA’s tour trailer. He talked about it during a Land Line Now segment.

“I don’t buy into that hero thing just for doing our jobs, but I really did enjoy the cleaner restrooms and showers,” he said. “They really were cleaner. The showers and the restrooms were really cleaner there for a while during the COVID, but now, eh, we seem to have gone back to normal.”

He said an OOIDA life member had a good suggestion when they were discussing the issue of clean restrooms in June when Ellis took the Spirit of the American Trucker to the American Truck Historical Society national truck show.

“If they’re going to mandate things, why don’t they mandate that shippers and receivers provide real, live restrooms that are actually cleaned and stocked for the drivers that are kind of held captive there waiting on their loads to load or be unloaded?” Ellis recalled the life member saying.

Ellis is scheduled to attend several truck shows over the summer.

In August, The Spirit is slotted to be at the Ault, Colo., Truck Show. After that, it’s the Waupun Truck-n-Show in Waupun, Wis., and the Big Rig Truck Show in Chippewa Falls, Wis. LL