We left North Andover at a sensible hour on April 4th, 2026, which is the kind of detail that sounds unremarkable right up until you say it out loud and realize that you're actually, finally, doing the thing. The van was loaded. The tanks were full. The boys were home. The driveway looked, as driveways do when you are about to leave them for three weeks, completely ordinary and somehow significant.
The sky over New England was the colour of old pewter — a low grey ceiling that New England maintains from roughly November through May as a kind of extended atmospheric commentary on optimism. We pulled out of North Andover, headed west on I-90, and waited for America to get interesting. It does this, but not immediately.
Day one covered 561 miles in nine hours. Across Massachusetts, through upstate New York, along the southern shore of Lake Erie — the lake surfacing occasionally at the edges of your peripheral vision, grey and enormous and unmoved by your passage — and into Pennsylvania, arriving in Erie as the light was going. Erie is not a destination so much as a pause. A Walmart car park, to be specific. We pulled in alongside a half-dozen other recreational vehicles of varying sizes and vintages, levelled the van, deployed the Starlink dish from its rooftop mount, and became, for the night, boon dockers.
Boon docking — the practice of camping without hookups, usually in unofficial or semi-official spaces — has a small but devoted religion built around it, and we were about to understand why. The Thor Tellaro, for a vehicle that is essentially a large cardboard box on wheels, is surprisingly self-contained. Freshwater tank. Grey tank. A toilet compact enough to use without philosophical resignation. A two-burner propane stove. A real bed. A clothes washing machine that fits in a cabinet and works, remarkably, on highway power. Starlink for internet that would make most hotels envious. The van is not comfortable in the way that a hotel room is comfortable, but it is free in a way that no hotel room can be. You sleep where the road deposits you. Nobody takes your name. You owe nobody anything in the morning.
That first night in Erie, we cooked pasta and watched the parking lot settle into its nighttime economy. Other travellers read. Truckers idled. A dog barked somewhere and was answered by another dog somewhere else. It occurred to us, not for the last time on this trip, that America conducts most of its actual life in spaces like this — parking lots and rest areas and truck stops, the connective tissue of a country that is permanently, constitutionally in transit.
Day two: 611 miles, ten hours. This is a lot of driving. We managed it by rotating duties, maintaining a generous supply of snacks, and stopping for fuel in a place that demands a longer description than any fuel stop has any right to receive.
Iowa 80 is, technically, a truck stop. Calling it a truck stop is like calling the Grand Canyon a ditch. Situated on I-80 near Walcott, Iowa, Iowa 80 bills itself — accurately — as the World's Largest Truck Stop, and it earns that title with a comprehensiveness that borders on municipal ambition. There are seven restaurants. A convenience store. A gift store that occupies approximately the square footage of a small shopping centre. A Super Truck Showroom displaying immaculately restored vintage rigs. A barber. A chiropractor. A dentist. A movie theater. A workout room. A laundry. Fuel islands stretching in both directions like an industrial horizon. A Truckomat truck wash large enough to process vehicles the size of small houses. A Dogomat pet wash, for the dogs. A CAT Scale for weighing your load. Twenty-four private showers. And, somewhat unexpectedly, a trucking museum — a genuine museum, with artefacts and context and everything — situated in what amounts to a rest stop on Interstate 80 in Iowa.
We ate. We walked around in mild bewilderment. We bought things we didn't need. We noted that the place operates twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and has done so since 1964, serving the river of commerce that flows endlessly west to east and back again across the American interior. Then we found a quiet corner of the car park, levelled the van, and slept. The second night of the trip. The road had already offered us more than we'd expected, and we were still in Iowa.
"Calling it a truck stop is like calling the Grand Canyon a ditch."
Conditions: Overcast throughout Day 1 and most of Day 2. Flat, even light with no shadows — frustrating for landscape work, ideal for certain types of documentary photography where harsh shadows would be a distraction.
Shooting from a moving vehicle: Use a shutter speed of at least 1/1000s to freeze the foreground. Rest the lens barrel against the window frame rather than pressing it to the glass (glass vibrates with road noise). Shoot in bursts — the hit rate on moving-vehicle shots is low, but quantity is your friend.
Iowa 80 as a visual subject: The truck stop rewarded documentary instincts more than landscape ones. Concentrate on details — chrome reflections in the fuel island canopies, the geometry of parked rigs at dusk, faces and signage in the shops. Overcast light is actually well-suited to this kind of work.
The grey-sky problem: Overcast skies blown to white in a frame are usually worse than no sky at all. When the sky is working against you, reframe to exclude it — keep your horizon line high, or eliminate it entirely by shooting down or across.
First-day calibration: The first day of a long trip is rarely your best photographic work. Use it to calibrate: check exposures, adjust white balance, figure out which compositThe first day of a long trip is rarely your best photographic work. Use it to calibrate: check exposures, adjust white balance, figure out which compositions the van's height naturally affords. Think of it as a paid rehearsal.ions the van's height naturally affords. Think of it as a paid rehearsal.ompositThe first day of a long trip is rarely your best photographic work. Use it to calibrate: check exposures, adjust white balance, figure out which compositions the van's height naturally affords. Think of it as a paid rehearsal!
