newmercman:
I thought you were selling up and buying a narrow boat
Make your mind up 
Yes, I am, in three years time, as I said. There will be plenty of other things to do between now and then.
newmercman:
There is a lot of ■■■■■■■■ being written on this thread and so far none of it has come from mickyblue 
Unless there has been an unforseen situation, like an accident, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to park on the hard shoulder 
If you are in unfamiliar territory then you should not be waiting until the 15min warning bleeper goes off before looking for somewhere to park 
That is bad planning, the drivers hours laws set a LIMIT to how many hours you can drive without a break/rest, not a TARGET that must be achieved at all costs 
It isn’t rocket science, a bit of planning before you start the final segment of your allowed hours and you can find somewhere safe to park 
If, for example, you are leaving Peterborough with 3hrs left on your card then you ain’t going to make Ashford Services, so you start looking around Maidstone and spend the final 45mins of your shift looking for somewhere to park, if you’ve hit traffic then it might be Dartford, or even call it a day with an hour and a half left at Birchanger Green if it’s approaching rush hour 
You can say that Johnny Foreigner won’t know how busy the M25 gets, but that’s ■■■■■■■■, we all knew the reputation of the big cities in Europe and wouldn’t, for example, join the Tangenziale around Milan at 4pm on 9hrs 45mins, we would’ve stopped on 8hrs 30mins at Carisio or Santhia or used a bit more time and parked in the services a bit further down the road 
For the benefit of the hard of thinking…
Foreign drivers take breaks on the hard shoulder when held up by RTAs because they face draconian fines in other countries by enforcement authorities who do not care about printouts or excuses but have simply been ordered to extract as much money as possible from the drivers of overseas-registered trucks in order to bail out their floundering economies.
If VOSA’s policy towards British drivers changed from understanding of occasional infringements, to the imposition of fines amounting to several months wages for exceeding legal limits by even a few minutes then you can bet the farm that every British truck driver would do exactly the same as the Flip-flops and dive onto the hard shoulder when his tacho read 4:29.
I say we need massively better parking facilities for trucks, Mickyblue says that punishment is the cure. You can take a man out of the Police, but you cannot take the Police out of a man.