A day at the World’s Largest Truck Stop

It’s a little after 9 a.m. in the Iowa 80 Kitchen. The waitress, dropping my plate of biscuits and eggs on the table, says, “Hope you like gravy,” and boy, is she not kidding.

Ahead of me: 12 hours in the 220-acre Walcott truck stop that claims the mantle of “World’s Largest.”

Iowa 80 opened in 1964, 22 years before Interstate 80 was completed near Salt Lake City. Founder Bill Moon, a Standard Oil location scout, picked the farmland near Walcott for its central proximity to Chicago, Omaha and Detroit. One service bay, a handful of fuel pumps, a communal shower, a bunk room and a lunch counter grew into a sprawling truckopolis with some 6,000 daily visitors and 600 employees. 

While it’s affiliated with the TravelCenters of America corporate chain, Iowa 80 remains independently owned by the Moon family to this day. It sits about 40 miles east of Iowa City and 16 miles northwest of Davenport.

Much hay has been made of its comically long list of amenities. Beyond the expected convenience store and showers, there’s a chiropractor, a dog-washing station, a food court with seven chain restaurants, a barber shop, a movie theater, a workout room, a dentist and more. And there’s the diner I’m in now, seated at a window booth with a view of the custom embroidery shop.

“Are you from around here?” the waitress — Amyra, if you’re reading this, thank you for being so nice to me that day — asks as she warms up my coffee.

I admit with some embarrassment that I’ve driven by this place a thousand times and decided on a whim to spend an entire day finding out what’s inside.

“Well, there’s a museum,” she offers. “You could watch a movie. And there’s a truck you can sit in, if that’s something you’re into.”

I ask about the dentist. I’m not alone — plenty of visitors are curious about Dr. Thomas Roemer, a University of Iowa College of Dentistry graduate and the truckstop’s full-time dentist of 32 years, including CBS Sunday Morning. As quirky as it seems at first, the clinic makes logical sense. Roemer started a small practice here after noticing how many emergency patients at his Davenport office were commercial truck drivers. Amyra says some Walcott residents use the truck stop dentist just to save them the 25-minute drive to Davenport. 

When I ask for the check, another waitress tells me conspiratorially that some guy already paid it. He left no tip on his $100 check, she says, but paid for my plate on the way out the door. I tell her that’s fuckin’ bullshit and leave her an extra $20.

I burn the first couple of hours watching a loop of Family Feud clips in the TV Lounge, the first location that makes me feel like I am trespassing. The lounge is between the laundry room and the showers, and everyone else here seems to be waiting for their pants and/or hair to dry. Two employees are chatting over their mop buckets, cleaning the shower stalls between occupants.

As I exit the lounge, I see a man and woman exiting one of the private showers together. 

Because of I-80’s status as one of the country’s major thoroughfares, it has long been identified as a conduit of human trafficking. Iowa, with its crossroads of 80 and 35, is a site of particular risk. In 2023, the most recent year of data from the Human Trafficking Institute, the Southern District of Iowa saw seven federal trafficking cases — among the highest of any district in the country. Law enforcement and the trucking industry have collaborated over the past decade to spread awareness and build support networks for survivors, and the nonprofit Truckers Against Trafficking provides commercial drivers with training on how to identify and report potential trafficking victims.

Iowa 80 may have a seedy history — Redditors on the r/trucking forum seem to think so — but it’s also one of the more surveilled places I’ve ever been. The World’s Largest Truck Stop is thoroughly decked with cameras everywhere you go, though thankfully none of the Flock, automated-license-plate-reader variety. The website boasts that the parking lot is so brightly lit that it can be seen from two miles away. If you’re committing a crime on the property, odds are good it’ll be documented.

I say hello to a photographer outside the Iowa 80 Trucking Museum who tells me he specializes in classic cars. He’s trying to get a cool angle of the building, which is designed to appeal to a very distinct sense of midcentury nostalgia.

“I couldn’t pass this place up,” he says.

I’m not a gearhead myself; if I had infinite money, I’d drive a Prius under five years old. I walk in anyway, clueless but pure of heart.

I somehow hadn’t realized until now that the Trucking Museum was a museum of trucks. Most of the 100-plus trucks in the collection are vintage. The lobby is home to a 1903 Eldridge made in Des Moines, and believed to be the oldest American-made truck still in existence. Some trucks are famous, like the one that winched Frank Bennett’s out of the lake in Fried Green Tomatoes. Others, I gather, possess a rarer beauty, obvious only to the discerning semi fan. 

I’m doing my best to get it. Yes, there are surprising colors and forms. There’s a wealth of hand-painted lettering in the old trucking company logos. As I wander the rows taking many photos, I start thinking about — well, trucks. 

The most salient geographical feature of this country is that it is huge. If you were to fold the United States hotdog-style, the crease might look something like I-80, its second longest interstate highway. Your humble narrator was born and raised along the Lincoln Highway, one of the earliest built for automobile traffic and the historical blueprint for I-80’s path. It is said to have been a source of inspiration for Eisenhower’s interstate project, as he traveled the highway with the 1919 Motor Transport Corps Convoy.

That the U.S. interstate system exists at all is a triumph of engineering, public campaigning and labor. It’s sort of hard to imagine us pulling off an undertaking like this today. And its purpose, increasingly, is getting stuff around.

Between 2010 and 2023, the number of trucks hauling commercial freight increased by 38.3 percent. The increase has put tremendous pressure on a system already lacking in legal truck parking. Truckers must often choose between parking where they’re supposed to or when they’re supposed to — that is, when their safety is compromised. As the demand for stuff continues to increase, the demand for commercial transport does, too. 

When you consider the scope, Iowa 80 starts to look like it should be a tourist attraction. But when you’re here, you are likely several hours from any place you want to be on purpose. That’s literally why Moon chose the spot.

The museum smells faintly of diesel. Without dust and asphalt to ground it, it feels almost clinical. If I were in a parking lot standing this close to a semi, it would be radiating the warm breath of the road. These trucks are like animals out of their habitat. 

I’m not interested in vehicles, but I am interested in homes, and these are mobile homes. A long-haul truck driver might spend weeks at a time on the road, away from house and family. Several museum placards describe innovations in design and their effects on the available living and sleeping space. Funny little sayings painted on some of the cabs point to the long hours spent inside: “Tilt’n Hilton,” “Aged to perfection.”

There is a cultural language here: evidence of superstitions, traditions, linguistic affectations. Some placards use she/her pronouns for trucks. It’s a point of pride for a truck — not just a driver, but the machine itself — to have clocked a large number of accident-free miles.

If you look at 100 of anything, slowly, with intention and nowhere else in the world to be, you’re likely to start seeing something to appreciate. Heading back across the parking lot to peruse the merchandise floor, I wonder when and why we stopped making everyday things look cool just because we can.

The Cornpatch Cadillac is a primary yellow 1987 Peterbilt 379 spinning slowly on a turntable in the floor as if it is being microwaved by our eyes. 

I climb in, a maneuver requiring surprising coordination. I flip the switches around a lil bit. The buttons aren’t as satisfying to push as I hoped, but I do feel very tall.

The entryway proclaims the showroom is a “candy store for truckers.” There is all kinds of stuff here and I have no idea what any of it is for. I get a little dazzled by big racks of shiny things: pipe-lookin’ stuff, thingies that go over bolts or something, and other doodads decidedly not meant for a shopper like me. 

A section of stickers pokes fun at the tyranny of shippers and dispatchers. I’m not in on the joke.

I slouch back toward the Iowa 80 Kitchen. One Reuben and a quick Diet Coke gossip sesh with the waitresses later, I’m looking for a bookstore, and I’m not finding one. I really assumed there would be, with this much space. 

Then, I find the GraphicAudio display. GraphicAudio doesn’t just publish audiobooks. Their publications are “A Movie in Your Mind!®” Cinematic music! Full cast! Digital effects! After all, you can’t eyeball-read while you’re operating 40 tons of heavy machinery. (Doy.)

There’s a good time to be had getting a sheet and a half to the wind and listening to The Earth Died Screaming 1 of 2: Bastard of the Apocalypse. But these days, GraphicAudio is moving to a podcast format, so these babies were on markdown.

I settle near the food court to lose myself in Free Trucker’s Bible King James Plus New Testament. The book has been knocking around in my tote bag since I grabbed it from a rack in the TV Lounge. The truck on the cover features a semi parked between road signs that say “JESUS: ONE WAY” and “ROUTE LUKE 14:23.”

I had never read the story of the Passion, and I was about to learn that there were three Marys in it. But first, I read the forward: “Trucker Stories.”

This is a series of firsthand accounts of how seven truck drivers found Jesus.

Gary saw a sign that said “CHRIST IS THE ANSWER” and called his wife’s pastor to repent. Mona started doing drugs to stay awake on the road and came to one day driving her truck on the wrong side of the road. She believes the EMT-trained truck driver who saved her life that day was an angel.

The drivers plead with the reader to accept Christ. And at the end of each one, unbelievably, is personal contact information. A Yahoo email address, a P.O. box, a phone number. These people are reaching out to hold someone’s hand. The back cover lists chapels and ministries seeking to be the spiritual home for truckers.

People stopping at this place are looking for a shower, a sandwich, a quick fix on a problem tooth. They have a difficult and critically important job, and they’re here for a moment to rest and maybe even to find fellowship with people who get it. Suddenly I feel like I’m fogging up their windows with my hot, stupid breath as I watch them live their lives.

I retreat into the onsite movie theater to watch Jurassic World Dominion. The movie has a lady who can sic velociraptors on people with a laser pointer.

I hit a PR on the elliptical in the workout room while watching Fox News against my will. I slink past Irene’s Barber and Styling Shop for a second time, chickening out again. It’s getting late into the day, and I’m not sure what the story I’m writing is supposed to be anymore.

This is a place you find yourself when you want to be somewhere else. (And I do.)

I buy a few souvenirs, briefly tempted by an impressive selection of cool-ass wolf T-shirts. I decide on a dinner of my typical pit-stop purchases: a plastic-wrapped sub and a bottle of green juice.

I park it at a picnic table outside and watch the sun park it, too. Brushing crumbs off my pants, I walk to the edge of the parking lot and look at the expanse. It has space for 900 trucks.

The thing that’s really surprising about the World’s Largest Truck Stop is that it isn’t bigger. Just about everything I’ve ever eaten, worn and owned got to me on a truck somehow or another, but this place isn’t a monument to the miracle and millstone that is our reliance on interstate commerce. It’s just a roadside curiosity.

I get gas. They have pretty fancy gas pumps.

I head for home.

This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2026 issue.