Strangers to Trucking Find New Home at TravelCenters
GREENCASTLE, Pa. — Kathy Frady, store manager at the TravelCenters of America, leans forward toward a visitor across from her cluttered desk, smiles and explains how she got into trucking — by accident.
After 23 years in banking, she answered an advertisement that mentioned travel, thinking she would become a travel agent.
Not exactly.
Instead, she found herself working at a TA location in Jessup, Maryland, near the Mid-Atlantic’s largest produce market.
Now, nearly 15 years later, she sounds like that “accident” turned out pretty well.
“I like what I do. It’s fun and challenging. We want to welcome everybody and have a little bit of everything for everybody,” she said, now walking past a game room, fitness center, driver’s lounge with a flat screen TV and a laundry area. A 200-seat restaurant occupies one side, with a counter selling fudge made on site. Across the hall is a store filled with food, clothing, a fire pit and entertainment ranging from country singer Lindsay Lawler’s CD to a scantily clad, gun-toting woman on a self-protection magazine cover.
The parking lot is typically full by nightfall.
“We fill up every single day, all 190 spaces” she said. “We’ll stack them in front of the scales, on the edge of the grass — anywhere we can find room.”
Thirty-six of those spaces are set aside for drivers who reserve them.
Frady defined a key part of her job as making sure every part of the building was clean and working properly. She’s also “trying to figure out what the driver is going to want next.”
Her answer, for September, was a dog park to attract drivers who increasingly have canine companions.
There also is careful attention to drivers’ fundamental needs.
“We can’t have bad coffee here,” she said. “There would be a mutiny.”
Because “truck stops can have a bad name,” TA also tries to appeal to local residents through the restaurant.
Restaurant manager Mike Winter told Transport Topics about 30% of diners are locals.
Winter, who was working at a Chi-Chi’s Mexican restaurant when that chain shut down in 2004, also admitted he was a stranger to trucking.
“TA looked like a good company to work for,” he said, so he signed on to run a restaurant near Youngstown, Ohio, before coming to Greencastle.
His focus, he said, is to offer food options, like a stir-fry buffet, with a chef standing by for special orders.
“We do what we can to ensure that everyone has a great dining experience,” he said.
Winter said he’s been to many travel plazas that have “nothing but fast-food joints.”
“That might work for some people,” he said. “If I was a trucker, I would rather go to a nice, sit-down restaurant.”
