You just have some Midwestern dad pulls up his big RV and blocks the bathroom door. Get out. Stop it. You hear that toilet seat creak? It's the best western toilet seat. Welcome back to Privy. Another episode of Privy Summer. Privycast is a podcast about toilets and bathrooms recorded this week again from the Best Western Room 222 toilet bathroom, bathroom, toilet, toilet bathroom. I'm your host from the Best Western hot seat, Hunter Hoover, and I love bathrooms.
They're great. It's Privy Summer. Happy Privy Summer. Hopefully you're doing well, school should be done, get it out of here, for the summer at least. And we are firmly into the official season of summer. For those of you who in your brain are like, the calendar never said it was summer, I go off summer by the temperature and the weather. But if you are like a calendar summer person, it's officially summer now. June 25, the day this episode comes out, is officially summer.
Happy. Privy, Summer, everybody. Hope you are doing well. um consider. And that's this. The premise of this jingle is that we can't talk about the shameful leavings that we do in the bathroom and for Charmin, the shameful things that people put on our paper. So instead of doing that, we're going to write a jingle and sing about it. Now, I like the jingle is not bad. It's a little fast, but whatever. But here at Privycast, we stand in ardent disagreement with that premise.
And that is, everybody goes to the bathroom and so it's fine to talk about it. It's fine. And if it ever stops being fine, this show might have some problems. last time we talked about how sometimes you have to go to the bathroom when there isn't a bathroom around. And Human Ingenuity has invented the porta potty for you to do so. Thanks Human Ingenuity and Sammy at the docks. Yeah, mysterious blue liquid, very good. In fact, man, I'm gonna share.
The day of recording this episode, I got the astute pleasure of using a porta potty at a wedding and man, it wasn't fresh, but man, was a well-kept porta potty and it was nice to have had because there was a few people at the wedding and yes, very good. Thanks again from the past, porta potties, very good. But this week, Privy summer, one of the things that people might be doing this summer is traveling.
Ah, you get in your car, you go vroom vroom, you load up the family, and we all know the experience. Yeah, you load up the car. Does everybody need to go to the bathroom? No, I don't have to go to the bathroom. You get out on the road, you get like 25 minutes down the road. Sure enough, clockwork. I have to go to the bathroom. And it's just the like, okay. And in your head, you're going, I do not want to get off at a town or a city where there's like a bathroom bathroom.
I'm going to go looking for this week's topic, privy cast. We're talking rest stops, rest areas, places for you to go on the road. For some people, when you go on the road trip, Rest stops serve a few key purposes. One, they're emergency relief. Sometimes you have to go in between stops, in between locations, and these stops, these rest areas, come in for the save. Or as I shared, as often happens, like when you stop for lunch and you get out and then everybody should have gone to the bathroom.
but they didn't. Like moments later, after getting back on the road, it seems like every single human being in the vehicle has to go to the bathroom. It's fine, I'm totally fine, it's all good, I'm fine. I'm good, I'm fine.
The other thing they do, which is the blessing side of their blessing and curse, is they offer a generally product and distraction-free stop to do exactly the things that you need to do on road trips, which besides voiding your tank and stretching your legs, for me means dumping all the accumulated trash into the receptacles at the stop. Clean it out. When you stop at a rest stop, there's no Ronald McDonald beckoning folks to buy his cheesy bees.
There's no candy in the fun little bags at gas stations saying sugar me up, matey. There's no Mountain Dew beckoning you from the weird coolers, making you going to have to stop again in probably 30 minutes. There isn't taking three different streets to get to food or gas because it's a town and they don't always build the food and gas right off the road. They exist to provide a place to stretch, bathroom, and rest. Rest areas, rest stops.
And, and this is the important part, see our pay toilets episode. They're free. At no cost to you, you can Take a poo. If you've taken a road trip and maybe many of you are gearing up to take road trips this summer, you have used or likely will use a rest stop. Those blue signs beckoning you and also taunting you. 50 miles until the next rest stop. Stop now, nerd, because if you don't, that turd has to chill for 50 miles. It's like neener neener, hope you have to go poo now.
Because if you have to go poo one moment after passing this stop, you're in for it. It's going to be a haul. It's guaranteed to be an hour before the next designated stop. So you better go now. You better go now. It's nice. Like I love my wife. She this happens frequently where, you know, she does her best to go when it is stop time. And like clockwork, I think it's I think it's just knowing that it's going to be a bit.
You see that science is all this long until the next one and people have to go again. That's all there is to it. Like it's nice that they put that warning on there, but it's also a bit of a juke. The worst is when you think there is a rest stop coming and there isn't or it's closed. No, no, that's bad. That's bad. If you're like, man, I just have to make it like six more minutes to this rest stop and, then I'll be good. Well, It's closed, so you're toast or town. And now...
It's time for a new segment on Privycast called Craptastic Apps. Welcome to Craptastic Apps, where we talk about apps that you use when you craps. If you're traveling this summer, especially if you are doing a road trip, you may want to download the USA Rest Stop Locator app. Yes, there is an app for that. And normally how this segment works is we look at an app and its usability while you are on the privy.
For this first and flagship episode of Craptastic Apps, we're gonna talk about the USA Rest Stop Locator app. It actually exists and it literally does exactly what it says. Tested it on the way here on our road trip out to Ontario, Oregon, where I am currently recording this episode. Open up the Rest Stop app. And at first, you know, it's kind of, it's not the most user-friendly. It says like, hey, here's nearby.
rest areas and it tells you if they're westbound or eastbound or northbound, whatever. Like you're to want to make sure that you're going to want to make sure that the nearest rest area is focused on the direction you're going. But the things that I like is the map features. So can look at the map and you can kind of see like, you know, there's not a bad rest area too far from here.
You can also filter this from location, northbound, like I said, ah as well as facilities that they have at those rest areas. One of which includes Wi-Fi, which I've never been to a rest area that I knew provided Wi-Fi. But yeah, it's got different states. You can search for them by states. You can actually create a login. um And when you use the facilities or visit the rest area, you can leave comments and feedback and stars so that way people know what they're getting into. Not a bad app.
Pretty simple. It's not really one that I think you're going to be using while on the privy unless you're, as I did, using the throne while at the rest area, which I opened it up, left a comment and review. uh yeah, but outside of that, you're mostly going to be using this one from the car. So from the throne rating, it's going to get a two. ah And of course, that's two out of question mark because the system's completely pointless and mostly made up.
As far as like user friendliness, it's not bad. You know, the map sometimes like says it has to refresh, which could be obnoxious. So we're gonna give it a three on user friendliness and fun, like Time Killer. We're just gonna give it a one. It's not really a Time Killer. It's a good app, it's a fine app. It does have ads on it. if you're adverse to ads, I would skip it. But yeah, this is more a utility than really a time suck for when you're plopping them.
So yeah. The USA Rest Stop Locator app. ah It also has paid things where you can add national parks to the system and the rest rooms that are at national parks. You can also pay to remove the ads, which is kind of cool. They have badges in here where I guess you could see your badges, which I have none, which is shameful. And now that I've clicked badges, I also can't get out of the badges menu. So ah there's that. USA Rest Stop Locator app. Could be nifty, it's pretty nifty.
This has been a first of many segments of craptastic apps. And now, you know, before, back to rest areas, before there were apps to tell us where to craps. The industry was marveling. At automobiles. The automobile assembly line. As more and more of these automobiles begin to be assembled, and it makes sense, like rest areas, you're probably traveling in a car. You can kind of make the connection here.
But as more of these automobile machines were being produced and later used, we have a problem. Old fashioned streets are not built for this many cars. And some of these new cars go way too fast. the streets are not going to hold up to this new vehicle and amount of travel. And if you've ever watched like the movie, Great Gatsby and seen them like tearing along these like dirt streets and stuff, uh-huh. Cause those, those are new vehicles traveling on old road technology.
Old fashioned streets were not built for new fashioned cars. In 1939, A man by the name of Thomas McDonald and his number one associate on his team, Herbert Fairbank, conceived of the first interstate road system. They put this conception into a report that they filed to Congress called Toll Roads and Free Roads. It was submitted to Congress and though the idea of toll roads being used was completely kaboshed, no way. Why would a person pay for the cost of building public highways?
The groundwork and plan was laid for a system of road to essentially stretch maybe one day from sea to shining sea. and remember, not all the states that are states right now were states at this point. You gotta remember that. Like we're talking Northeast mostly, maybe Midwest a little bit.
If we aren't going to have tolls like, If you're not going to drive through and if you've ever been to like for me in my brain, I think of Florida, like they have like the the sun beltway or whatever where you can like drive up to little kiosk and now they're not usually manned by people and you either toss your money in or could chunk your card and it lifts the gate or some people have like prepaid passes and they're in the window and it scans and they're able to travel on these toll roads.
You avoid traffic. They're well kept all this thing because you're paying of essentially a fee to maintain these roads. Allow me to creek the best Western toilet seat a little bit as I adjust my spine. That's good podcasting. m If we're not going to have tolls to pay for these things, we got to have some way to pay for these public roads. And over the course of the next 18 years, so 1939 plus 18 years, 1957ish, there are murmurings and plans to pay for this public interstate system.
But that system was not the one we see today. Many of those original quote, interstate roads were turned into US highways later on. So if you ever travel on highway, US highway, whatever, it's very likely that in the past that was considered the interstate. Often those are two-lane roads. Some have been expanded to be bigger than that over time. The history of rest stops is not just wrapped up in the history of automobiles. It's also wrapped up in the Cold War.
For many of us in the US, driving has meant we have used the United States Interstate system. If you go back a short 60 to 70 years ago, the interstates don't exist or what few did exist do not look like they do today. That system was not the one that we see and we think of when we think of interstates today. Many of these original roads are now US highways as I stated.
There was a funding problem with this US highway interstate system and getting folks to buy into the idea of like either taxes or some sort of government spending in order to fund public public interstate and public spending of millions of dollars to lay a network of roads was a hard sell. We got roads. Our roads are fine. But pay pay for the roads yourselves. There was a funding problem and with it Getting folks to literally buy into the public spending of these roads was tough.
After World War II, Hitler's defeat and the fall of that situation, there were tensions in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, over the landscape and who would assimilate and take all that stuff. Western Europe, who the United States had supported, was at odds with Eastern Europe where the Soviet Union wanted to begin to move in and spread uh communism into the area. there is this tension and the United States via our support of Western Europe is in lock and is in tension with the Soviet Union.
Over time, this tension resulted in not only the Cold War but extensions of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Korean War, and they can even be related and seen as a link to our involvement in Vietnam. The Cold War was, get this, cold. Because relatively little fighting happened. It wasn't cold because it was on ice. It was cold because it was like, it was kind of dead. Like, relatively little actual combat or like conflict happened.
Rather, much of the tension and the conflict was in this posturing that occurred particularly between the United States and the Soviet Union, where we both stood there with our fists clenched, grimacing at each other, waiting for one country or one entity to make the first move. In World War II, the United States had also dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. And now the Soviet Union had an A-bomb of their own. And sights were set on the US.
The United States knew pretty well what an A-bomb had done. And we also knew that we didn't want one on us. Nuh-uh. And so you can see where the Soviet Union and United States are at odds and there's this tension. It was a time of great uncertainty. The Cold War came with a lot of uncertainty. So we stood fist clenched staring down the Soviet Union. Who's going to move first? Missiles are installed nearer to the Soviet Union wherein we could launch a counterstrike into Russia if we needed.
As a result and maybe as a statement, I don't know, I'm not a historian, but the Soviet Union installed or repurposed missiles in Cuba to be able to be launched at the United States. thus resulting in what is the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now we have a real problem because Cuba is incredibly close to the United States and they got missiles there. We have a problem. Who's gonna fire first? Who's gonna push the button? And every day there's reports, okay, we gotta do it. Who's gonna do it first?
Who's gonna first? And we stared back and in short, like, who's gonna cause one of the greatest nuclear events in human history? In short, the answer is no one. an was made. A ceasefire or an agreement to not fire was arrived at. But in that tension, in that Cold War tension, schools began doing missile and bomb procedures, teaching kids how to hide under their desks and prepare for nuclear fallout if it came.
Evacuation plans were drawn up, and with them, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, based on McDonald and Herbert's plan about the toll and free roads earlier, and other legislature pushed for the passing of the Federal Highway Act, which passed in 1965, with plans not only for funding the interstate system, but building it up, making it better as well. The push that the interstate system needed to get over the funding hump was a cold war.
Tensions and uncertainty allowed the interstate system to be funded. Eisenhower wanted the interstate system to be used as an evacuation tool. If someone drops a bomb on us, we're going to need to be able to get out to different areas of the country to safely and efficiently move people. We need better roads. We have our fast cars. Now we just need unclogged and uncongested roads on which to drive those fast cars to safety. And thus, with fears of bombing, the interstate system was born.
The military could also more easily navigate their equipment and the interstates were regulated and up to code to be able to handle the weight of military grade machines on their roadways. In fact, when this was first passed, the interstate system was known as the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. They put the word defense in there to remind the public this is for your safety.
in fears that it would not get passed, they include the word defense, interstate, and defense highways in order to make sure that the funding for this project went through. But what's interesting here is they didn't really need to put defense in it and nobody knows them as defense highways now, because we know them as interstate highways, because people loved them. Once they started to put these in, they're like, dude, I can get from one place to another. relatively quickly. There's no traffic.
It's less congested. And if you hear that and you're like, dang, when I'm on the interstate, there's always traffic. We're, yeah, we're running into a new problem with our interstate system nowadays. People love the interstate system and with them driving really, really far. But evacuations, remember the original purpose for the interstate system, those can take time. It can take time to evacuate people.
And if you have thousands and thousands of possibly even millions of people on a highway at the same time traveling in one direction away from an event or a catastrophe, they're going to need to hit the privy and they probably didn't have time to do the, hey, has everybody gone to the bathroom? Check on the way out. They're running for cover. And so, safety rest areas were installed, quote, safety rest areas, unquote, were installed as part of the interstate highway system.
Originally offering basic roadside bathroom amenities, they've changed over time to the common rest areas we know, love, and have used today. At their outset, these rest areas were crucial. had to have them. If you went on a road trip, you definitely had to use them. And here's why. In the late 50s, and you might, okay, so you might hear that and you might go, I could go from point A to point B and never set foot inside a rest area. Easy. Here's the thing, not so easy back then.
Because essentially Ronald McDonald and Exxon killed the rest area, sort of, or are currently killing the rest area. In the late 50s and early 60s, the idea of chain restaurants and chain gas stations was not really heard of, or if it was, it was not very widespread. Major cities might have the common McDonald's by the 60s or 70s, but one every 20 minutes of driving or less was unheard of. Like, your town probably had one maybe, but there was no way that your town had two.
And you might drive a considerable distance before you get to the next McDonald's in the major town or restaurant. We're picking on McDonald's here, Subway, pick your restaurant. But these franchising and like having multiple in every city and one in all the tiny cities in between, that was not a thing.
Often you had to gas up when you saw a gas station because if you didn't, there was no guarantee that you were going to get to another gas station in between the one in the major town you're in or the kind of bigger town you're in and the next town up the road. Could be a couple hours. And so if you're going a couple hours in between amenities, even if there's little tiny towns in between, these rest areas are crucial because there was no place to stop in between except for the rest area.
You didn't have a guarantee of another Exxon or another Shell or another McDonald's or another QuickMart. Like you didn't have that guarantee. and so rest areas are here. But, and it's a big but, as we move into the age of franchises and oversaturation, there's McDonald's and Subways and Burger Kings everywhere. Like, there's a Starbucks all over the place. There's Walmart in like a lot of the towns. There's something somewhere. Gas stations all over the place.
Most towns have multiple gas stations, even in little towns. And so, as these other businesses, these, I don't know what the word is, franchise businesses begin to spread and begin to put their shops and their restaurants across the United States along this interstate system, people go, man, know, McDonald's is staffed with nice employees who clean their bathrooms, and so their bathrooms are gonna be cleaner than the rest area. I'm gonna use the McDonald's before I go. This is normal now.
We get it. It's normal behavior. But as people begin to do this more and more, rest stop and rest area use begins to fall by the wayside. Rest areas, though not always having staff on site, need staff to operate clean and maintain the facilities and grounds. And these are excellent people doing excellent work. And we applaud you, but we also know that funding for your job is likely not as not what it used to be.
With fewer people using the amenities, many of them have become many of these amenities, these rest areas have become unused or less frequently traveled or populated. In modernity, there are even states that have discussed actually getting rid of all of their rest areas. Do away with them. If you got McDonald's, why does little Chuckie need to go to the rest area? Just hit McDonald's on his way out. and hit the next McDonald's on the way into the next town.
The frequency of these stops is not as important as it is in the days of the Cold War. You don't need one every 40 to 50 miles now. Both with lowering concerns of an atomic bomb drop and with more and more access to other amenities, rest stops are less and less essential. They're still very good. But we're lying to ourselves if we need them as much as we did 50 to 70 years ago. We don't.
And if something is less essential, it makes sense for the government, which has been funding those things since, again, the outset of these discussions in the 30s, to want to save some money and not fund them in the ways that they have been for the last 80 years or 60 years since they've been built. There was talk by the state of Connecticut to close down all seven of the rest areas in its highway system.
Many of these rest areas are not just in Connecticut, but across the United States, are 50 plus years old. Not all of them. Some are not as old. But many of them are 50 plus years old. And they're gonna need expensive maintenance and upkeep. To shut one of these down, it's estimated, I think it was North or South Dakota, uh they looked at shutting down a network of three to five rest areas.
So they have rest areas in a chain and these like set of three to five rest areas, if they close them down, it would save their state $200,000 a year. Not to mention the cost that they might have one day of redoing the plumbing and making the facilities comply with ever-changing guidelines. You have new guidelines where they have to be handicap accessible and should be handicap accessible. They have new health guidelines that they have to maintain and upkeep.
Ones that were probably not in place when these facilities were built in the 50s, 60s and 70s. It would seem rest stops and rest areas or at least some of them may be on their way out.
There may be a day where you take a trip and you don't go through a rest area or you don't go through what I will call a traditional rest area because as we're going to see many of these governments and state owned locations are going to either be turned over to the private sector where they're allowed to sell goods and services from it McDonald's at your rest area or they're going to change them and find a way to generate goods and revenue for the the state to generate funds off of but
That's starting to sound a lot like a toll road to me, which was rejected, just saying. If you come to a rest area this summer, there are some general guidelines to follow. In many rest areas, I will note, many rest areas are being turned into these community or cultural centers where it began as a rest area and you pull in and now it's a cultural center where you can learn about the history of the area or the state or wherever you're at.
There's probably some merchandise you can buy, bumper stickers, that type thing, and it helps generate not just revenue to pay for the rest area, but it also generates like knowledge and history and an interest in the state itself. It's a good idea. But if you're gonna be using these rest areas, there's some general etiquette and guidelines to follow. outside of bathrooming at rest areas, there's some etiquette.
If you plan to sleep in your car overnight at a rest area, look online before doing so. Every state has different rules about, about, whether they allow people to sleep there and how many hours they're allowed to make their stop. The idea is this, make your stop brief because if it runs out of parking spots, then somebody can't stop to do the rest area. That goes for both parking and bathrooming. Don't chill out in the bathroom. Many people want to get back on the road.
So setting up shop and say, I don't know, recording a podcast in the bathroom is probably not a good idea. So if anybody was like thinking about doing that, they should probably not be doing that. It's not an option. As always, if I can give an overlying assumed thing, if you use a bathroom, leave it at least as clean as you found it. Here's why. Like I said, the people working to maintain these facilities, they're doing good work, but they probably have multiple locations they have to go to.
There probably isn't one person on one site cleaning one facility all day. And so if somebody comes in and just yellow sprays the entire bathroom, everybody else who stops at that rest area is gonna have to use it. And often if you're stopping at a rest area, it's an emergency stop and you gotta do it quick. So clean up after yourself. No one likes using dirty rest areas, so clean up. Don't park or do something that will block the access to the restroom. This is a no-brainer, no done.
Don't park. You just have some Midwestern dad pulls up his big RV and blocks the bathroom door. Get out. Stop it. I don't think this is a problem. Modern rest areas, this is not gonna be a problem. It's pretty clear where to park. We've got pretty clear like RV parking and not RV parking nowadays. Many rest areas have rules about what you can use their sinks for. Can't wash clothes, can't wash dishes, can't take a bath. Now, here's what I'll say. I get the bath thing.
Don't be taking a bath in the rest area, unless there's like provided showers, which the ones I've been to don't have. But like, I've definitely rinsed out kids clothes when they've gotten dirty in the sink. I'm not gonna just leave them get stained, like rinse it out. I've also probably rinsed out a dish or something. It's fine. Like just clean up whatever mess you make. Now, I think the problem here is the world is full of irresponsible people who aren't going to clean up the mess they made.
In the words of Jordan Peterson, make your bed. Like, take care of it. Take care of it for yourself. You shouldn't have to have some worker deal with your filth. That's all there is to it. Just try your best. Don't smoke in the bathroom. Like, if you gotta go take a puff, they usually got puff areas. Puff spots, as you call them. If you have a furry friend, or as some like to call them a pet, traveling with you, and they drop a puppy log on the ground, pick it up. That's everywhere by the way.
If you don't own the ground under and onto which your animal defecates, you have to clean it up. It's a rule. It's a rule of society. You just have to. you know who, if you hear that and you're like, my gosh, I think he's talking to me. I am. Clean up your dog poop. Do it.
One last etiquette piece here is if you are in the restroom and they are out of supplies or If the supplies are running low, there is often a number somewhere on the rest area or rest stop grounds for a number to call to let someone know. Let that worker know, hey, you're doing a great job. The bathroom at rest area, and this is why that USA rest area locator app, tell them what area rest area. We're out of soap down here and we need a soap reload.
Giving that call is going to save somebody else from running out. It's going to bail a fellow traveler out in a pinch in a big way later on. Rest area etiquette. Just be good to one another. Rest stops. I hope you enjoy a rest stop this summer and while you're doing so, hope you, you know, that tension that you're feeling about, man, I don't know if I'm gonna make it to the next spot.
Just remember, it was much worse and the Cold War had a lot more tension and without it, you wouldn't have your rest area. I guess technically it's Eisenhower, McDonald and Herbert that set this up, but like they, it wouldn't have got pushed forward without the Cold War. So I guess thanks. I don't know. I feel weird doing that. That's whatever. This has been another episode of Privycast. Thank you for joining us. Loved having you. As always, connect with us on social media.
We're at Privycast on social media. Send us an email. If you've got topic suggestions or feedback or just want to say hi, share a story. Just privycast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us a rating or review, share the show, all those things. It's greatly appreciated. As always, we want to thank Kevin McLeod. for use of Bar Room Ballet as our intro and outro music. You can find Kevin's music at incompetech.org and it's licensed under Creative Commons 4.0. Thanks Kevin.
This has been another episode of Privy. Thanks again for joining us. And now, as always, don't forget to flush. Hefty Slider Bags presents the Hefty Cha Cha Slide. Hefty Slide now y'all. Get funky with me. Let's go. Slide to the left. Slide to the right. Shake the bag one time. Shake the bag two times. Crisscross. So strong. Cha Cha Hefty Stroke. Hefty Hefty Hefty. Hefty Slider Bags. it with a slide. One more time now y'all. Come on.