Franglais:
Lots of budget hotels in Europe. Many are only staffed at peak times. Arriving out of hours entry is fully automated through your bank card.
Used them when I went on a spur of the moment trip to go see the viaduct at Millau. Absolutely spot on for somewhere just to get a decent shower and a nights kip on a trip.
During my transporter years i often spent nights in cheap hotels or B&Bs, if you’re polite the hotel will usually have somewhere within a couple of hundred yards where you can park the lorry, the one at Newport i used to stop at the Christian centre next door didn’t mind the odd lorry reversing carefully into their car park and tucking the lorry out the way.
Note, reversing into their car park 
, not swing in with a 44 tonner and screw it round ripping the surface to shreds which the screw drivers would do and them moan because there’s no parking available 
From £19 a night…?
Surely still cheaper than some, or make that many, MSA parking areas with ■■■■ food and even ■■■■ ter showers…!
The lorry…
Parks in the truck park where we all currently park.
It’s not a scheme aimed at drivers, it’s designed for anyone who wants no frills budget accomodation.
The origional MSA motels were for lorry drivers to overnight in. As sleeper cabs became more sophisticated and dumbass drivers included night out money as part of their wage, the hotel chains aimed for the business traveller market and never looked back.
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Yep, night out money was for digs overnight. That was B & B. If the boss wanted the lorry to be parked somewhere secure, he paid for that separately.
Darkside:
Rjan:
Darkside:
We currently have the shower head for one depot in the traffic office. Drivers have to return it after the shower.The previous three were stolen…
Think what could be nicked from a Premier Inn
Can’t have been beyond the wit of man to have just secured the shower head - perhaps using a malleable iron, standpipe-type system like they use in the third world - rather than arsing around with taking a wet shower head back to the clerk each time!
Commercial fittings have to cater to the lowest common denominator in aesthetic and durability.
AND THERE IT IS!!!
The kind of attitude that has got us where we are…
‘It hasn’t been secured so it is ok to nick it’, bit like ‘there wasn’t a sign saying do not throw rubbish on the floor so I thought it was ok’…
It’s not a case of saying it’s “ok to nick it”, it’s a case of saying that public fittings should be reasonably resistant to vandalism by a tiny minority.
You wouldn’t buy a house with a front gate light as a feather and which could be lifted off its hinges, and you wouldn’t buy a front door without a Yale lock. You wouldn’t have a fresh unwrapped meat counter in a shop which involved the customers touching the meat.
Why then get worked up about a shower head being taken, when the normal principles of public fittings - principles which are there to protect the fittings from a small undesirable element of unidentifiable strangers, and a normal range of habits and attitudes about what is acceptable and what isn’t - have not been followed?
Also, everyone assumes another driver has taken the shower head. I wouldn’t consider it beyond the realm of possibility that a manager, or a cleaner, had taken it. People who don’t form the class of users of the shower.
But even if it is another driver, I don’t see why the solution is not to just use normal secure commercial fittings, instead of going through the charade of collecting the shower head from the clerk each time and engaging in moral outrage.
