A look at service-plaza nightlife

After five weeks of two-lane back roads, I'm afraid I might be sounding too sanctimonious about avoiding interstate highways. I realize sometimes you have to get someplace freeway-fast.

So, I get off my high horse to take a road trip along the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Harrisburg.

As long as I'm on the freeway going fast, I decide to slow down as I visit a few "multi-concept service plazas" (rest stops to you and me).

As East Coast drivers with all of our toll roads, we take our rest stops for granted. In most of the rest of the country, easy-on, easy-off means vending machines. Ours have video games, clean and spacious restrooms, pay phones, travelers' maps, CNN on television, and a smörgåsbord of eats. Some even have outdoor farmers' markets.

I begin at the Delaware River Bridge connector to the New Jersey Turnpike. If I were to keep driving west to Ohio, I'd cover 357.6 miles and pay a $19.75 toll.

Oh yeah, I'm starting this at 3 a.m. because I'm curious who's on the road then, or more important, who's gotten off the highway.

Plus, the night might add some visual variety to my road-trip photos.

Pulling into the North Neshaminy Service Plaza, I find it mostly empty. The three cars parked in the lot appear to have sleeping drivers.

Just outside the door, Rahsan Allen and Brian Cost are on a smoke break. They make up two-thirds of the rest stop's third shift - 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Both say they prefer the night duty (it pays a dollar per hour more).

The other third is Tanya Krekmanova, of Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, who talks with Allen when it's slow. Her English is great.

A university student in Sofia, she's here for four months with the State Department's Summer Work and Travel Program to work at the rest stop - one of 24 international students working there. (She's a barista at the Starbucks.) The others come from Russia, Turkey and Ukraine.

Krekmanova wants to travel to "New York, for sure," and to Niagara Falls before she returns home. "My cousin was there, and she said it's so beautiful." So far, she's been to the Franklin Mills Mall and "the Old Town in Philadelphia."

Then, in pulls long-haul trucker Bob Hooper of Roberta, Ga. I'm shooting outside as he walks up and asks how far away Fort Washington is.

"I usually know where I'm going," he says. But this time, "it was Plan B: Get close and figure it out when you get there."

He goes inside to check the stop's "You Are Here" map.

He and Worf, his 100-pound boxer (named after the Klingon character in Star Trek) travel about 140,000 miles a year. Hooper sleeps well at night, not worried about being bothered.

If "you try to do something to my truck and see him look down at you," he says, "you think there has got to be something easier to do."

The sun is coming up as I merge back onto the freeway, joining mostly, it appears, morning commuters.

Forty-six miles later, at the Peter J. Camiel rest stop, I find Cinnabon, Brioche Doree, Roy Rogers, Sbarros, Starbucks, Hershey's Ice Cream, a gift shop, and an A Plus convenience store at the Sunoco gas station.

And Alice Gray, in the passenger seat of her King Ranch F-350 Ford pickup, attached to a 28-foot trailer.

She and her husband, Jim, have stopped so she can walk their dog, Sparkie, while Jim takes a little nap at the start of a three-week road trip to South Dakota's Black Hills, Yellowstone, Colorado, and back through Nashville. (Besides the great outdoors, they like music.)

They planned to leave at 4 a.m., but got a late start from home in Browns Mills, N.J.

As I run back to my car to retrieve my pen, Alice wakes Jim up. The couple "started with a tent in the mid-80s," he says. "Then we got a pop-up camper, a travel trailer, and now this. It's called a fifth wheel."

Jim figures next would be an RV - a step he's in no hurry to take.

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