If you’ve read my posts on TruckNet UK, you’ll have noticed that to count the number of nights out I do a year might be possible using one hand and certainly wouldn’t require me to take my socks off! However this week an abattoir delivery in South Wales was booked for late Thursday afternoon. Looking at the pick ups scattered around North Devon I soon realised that getting home wasn’t going to happen in the same day!

As I don’t do regular nights out I don’t know very many of the good/quiet places to park, so I searched the usual places on the web, Dug out the HA Truckstop guide (which I soon noticed didn’t cover Wales!) and read my Truckers Handbook looking for somewhere suitable! To be honest after doing that I wasn’t much further forward! Apart from the two M-way services (which I already knew) there seemed to be a small place near Newport and a cattle market where my sleep would probably be disturbed by ladies looking for ”business” !

As the chance of getting into a MSA at 9-10pm is almost nil, (which is strange as everybody moans about the cost of parking in them!) I resigned myself to trying to find a space in a lay-by, in conditions that the average member of the British public would want Oxfam to start an appeal for if it was abroad!!

Unfortunately, plentiful safe parking with good facilities is something we can only dream about in this country.

In the end the gods looked down on me “favourably”! By the time I’d done all the pick ups (which always takes longer than it should, and today took 7 hours! ) paid the £15.90 to cross the bridge, unloaded and washed out there wasn’t very much time left of a 15-hour day! So a quick chat with the Security guy (who was unlike some of the ones you read about on the web – he was quite helpful!!) found me a nice corner of the abattoir to park up and a toilet, a shower room and a mess room with a kettle and microwave to use! So it was a case of a quick shower, cup of tea, finish the sandwiches, break into the emergency food supplies that I keep under the bunk, get some kip and be ready for the next day!

Denis Fuller is a owner-operator based in the South West, running a single truck on livestock and agricultural haulage