I want to start this by saying how much I miss truck stops. I mean, real truckstops, pulling into a gravel parking lot at 4am off a two-lane blacktop in the middle of a cold Wyoming night chicken-fried steak with cathead biscuits and sassage gravy and rocketfuel coffee while Merle Haggard plays on the pushbutton jukebox truckstops. When I was a kid my Dad drove truck in the winter, when farm work was slow, and I can still remember driving all night, listening to Red Simpson and Jerry Reed and a whole lotta Waylon while the CB chattered away the miles. Truckstops were an island of light in a long dark night, the only place to get coffee after 10pm in the days before 7-11s  and fastfood, a place where you could see your eggs being cracked onto the flattop grill by a cook who either looked like a Methodist grandma or an ex-con, sometimes both. Anywhere we stopped, my Dad invariably knew someone. Didnt matter where, we could walk in the door anywhere between West Texas and West Virginia and someone would say "  Howdy, Pete ". Years later when I was running the roads alone , truckstops were a refuge from the blue highways, a place that always felt worn and comfortable, warm in frozen Dakota nights and cool on brutal desert days. If I could only capture that feeling, distill it to an essense, and put it on a plate........