Realistically, Can I Park at Planet Fitness & Work Out?

It’s not impossible just harder to get a good workout. Most gyms near cities have smaller parking usually can’t fit a 53ft trailer without putting yourself in the position to get stuck if a 4 wheeler parks near you.

My opinion? Carry some free weights for days you can’t reach one. Plan your trips so you shutdown near a gym sometimes you’ll have to use an Uber to get there. When you’re on hometime workout like heck!

 

Not all planet fitnesses are the same. It's a parking lot issue. If a planet fitness was in a town of 5000 people and you could park on the side in a mall parking lot then yes. But I would think that's very unlikely.

 

It's not very often your trip will have a couple of hours free for you to do much, if it's anything like my OTR. Everybody on the shipping and receiving end of the process, including your dispatcher, mechanics, etc like to pretend if you have a 500 mile trip everyone incolved, except them, will do all of their tasks like a NASCAR pit crew. The truth is everyone in the process but the driver will put their feet up on their desk and do their job at maximum personal convenience and expect you to dry 40 mph faster than your truck;s maximum speed and as long as you arrive 1 second before your appointment time or with 1 second left to legally drive everything has gone well. Your dispatcher will assume the entirety of the US road network has truck parking every 6 inches instead of many places where the nearest truck parking is 30-90 minutes from the customer and with only about 25% of the parking needed on a typical night. If you want parking, you better plan to be at the parking by 4-8pm local time, depending on the amount of truck traffic destined for the nearest big city.

It will do no good to explain this to any customer or any employee at your trucking company because they have already heard this explanation every day since the day they started working and somehow every day almost every load delivers nearly on-time. This is the stress of this job, that isn't the primary stress of having 90% of cars routinely and deliberately trying to cause a crash with your truck that takes 180 feet to stop by pulling in front of your front bumper and stopping in 8 feet or 8 inches.

The big misunderstanding newbies have is that the Hours of Service limit driving to 11 hours maximum per day and "guarantee" 8 or 10 hours per day of rest and then concluding the rest of the 24 hours in a day are available for other things. You will feel lucky on many days to have 10 hours you can use for sleeping, meals, showers, doing paperwork. It's like everyone in the process is using the same "unused" time in a day several times over. If it takes 9:45 of driving from A to B, your dispatcher is likely to take 1:25-3:00 hours to answer some issue, while the shipper takes 1:25-3:00 hours to load the truck, and the mechanics fixing a flat tire take 1:25-3:00 hours to do their job and the receiver takes 1:25-3:00 hours to find you a dock door to back into to be unloaded. But when all of those "wasted hours" cause the appointment to be missed they will lecture you about trip planning and time management.

 

My lane, I go from NWI to Iowa, usually Marshalltown. I reload the next day. There is a Planet Fitness in Marshalltown, but usually I go back to Quad Cities. I'll drop at Iowa80 and bobtail to Planet Fitness. That is PC, whereas the time in marshalltown eats up my 14.