Three months into my first tramping run, on a Tuesday morning at Immingham, someone knocked on my cab window while I was eating breakfast and asked me if I was alright. Not in a welfare way. In a "have you noticed the state of your immediate environment" way.
They were tactful about it. I was less tactful in my head. Because they were right. Six months earlier I'd moved from local work — home every night, regular showers, meals I'd cooked myself — to full-time tramping. And I hadn't adjusted to the hygiene realities of living in a cab for five days at a stretch.
This isn't an article about being dirty. It's about the gap between what drivers expect of overnight life in a truck and what the practical reality requires. That gap is bigger than most inductions cover, and the consequences are both personal and professional.
The shower problem
Truck stop showers exist. They range from genuinely excellent to "I'm going to keep my flip-flops on and try not to touch the walls." The variability is enormous and changes faster than any published guide keeps up with — a site that was clean in March can have different management and broken showers by September.
What I learned: don't plan your hygiene around a specific site. Plan around a category of sites, with a backup. Blyth has showers, Wetherby has showers, Scotch Corner has showers. If three sites in a 200-mile stretch have showers, and your schedule allows you to be near one of them in the evening, you can almost always get a shower. The mistake is banking on a specific one, arriving at 21:00 to find both cubicles broken, and having no plan B.
The other mistake — and I made it for two months — is waiting until late to shower. Truck stop shower facilities at 09:00 on a weekday are usually quiet, clean, and functional. At 18:00 on a Friday they're full, often misused, and sometimes out of hot water. My current routine: if I finish an early afternoon delivery near a site with showers, I use the break for a shower at 14:00, eat something, and get back on the road. Doesn't cost extra time. Changes the experience significantly.
What you carry and what you need
Most drivers I know took too much on the first tramping week and not enough on the second. The first week, you think you need everything. The second week, you've realised that everything creates clutter in a space where clutter directly affects your quality of life and your ability to find things.
What I carry now, after six months of refinement:
- A dedicated bag for personal hygiene — shower gel, shampoo (combined, smaller), deodorant, toothbrush and paste, a razor. All travel-sized or decanted into small bottles. None of it loose in the cab.
- A small towel — one of the microfibre sports ones. Takes up no space, dries fast. Don't try to use the truck stop's towels. They vary.
- Flip-flops — for truck stop showers, as mentioned. Not negotiable. After my second truck stop experience I bought them the same afternoon.
- A change of clothes per working day — not more, not less. Compresses into a medium holdall. In summer this is minimal. In winter, when work gear is bulkier, it requires some planning.
- A small washing bag — I carry two or three ziplock bags for wet or dirty items. Wet socks need not be part of your main cab environment.
The cab smell problem
Let me be direct about this, because nobody was direct with me. Cabs accumulate smells. Food, sweat, damp work gear, wet boots — in an enclosed space that's parked for nine hours a night with the windows closed, everything concentrates. After a week of tramping with poor ventilation habits, a cab can smell significantly worse than the driver realises, because they've been in it continuously.
The fix is mostly ventilation and frequency. Ventilate when you can — any time you're parked up and the weather permits, leave a roof vent cracked. Don't leave food packaging in the cab overnight, or if you do, make sure it's sealed. Work boots — particularly if they've been wet — should ideally live in the cab's external storage if you have it, or at least be kept to the footwell with a plastic bag underneath them.
A small travel spray deodoriser is not vanity, it's maintenance. Use it in the sleeping area before you get in, not in the morning to cover a problem that's already developed. Lavender or plain unscented — anything with a strong synthetic fragrance will just add to the smell problem rather than solve it.
Sleeping arrangements
The bunk in most modern artic cabs — a Scania R-series, a DAF XF, a Volvo FH — is genuinely comfortable if you set it up properly. The factory mattress is usually adequate for the first season and degrades from there. A mattress topper — the thin memory foam type — doesn't take up much space when rolled, makes a significant difference to sleep quality, and is worth the £40 it costs.
Bedding is personal. I know drivers who sleep in a sleeping bag every night, drivers who carry proper duvet and pillowcase sets, and drivers who use the blanket they've had in the truck since 2019. What matters is that it's clean, it's warm enough for the temperature range you're working in, and it gets washed regularly.
Wash frequency is the thing most new trampers underestimate. A duvet or sleeping bag used five nights a week accumulates body heat and moisture faster than a domestic duvet used once. Monthly washing is a minimum. Every two to three weeks is more appropriate if you're doing back-to-back tramp weeks. Most laundrettes can accommodate a sleeping bag. Most motorway service areas near urban areas have a laundrette or can direct you to one.
Temperature management in winter
I ran one winter on the M6/A1 corridor before I sorted the cab heating properly. The Scania I was in had an Eberspächer diesel heater that worked fine. I didn't know how to use it efficiently.
The parking heater — not the engine — is what you use for overnight. Running the engine to stay warm burns fuel and oil, puts hours on the engine unnecessarily, and is generally frowned upon at lorry parks where some have noise restrictions. The parking heater uses a fraction of the diesel and keeps a cab warm on a January night in the northeast without the engine running. Learn how your specific unit works before the cold nights arrive, not during them.
In terms of what you wear: thermal base layers for winter tramping aren't optional equipment, they're the difference between a nine-hour rest that's actually restful and one where you've spent two hours half-awake trying to pull a blanket across your shoulders while it falls off the bunk. A proper thermal layer under work clothes, a decent fleece for the cab environment, and sleep warm rather than relying on the heater to compensate for inadequate bedding.
Food and the cab kitchen
The cab isn't a kitchen and you shouldn't treat it as one in terms of what you cook — but you can make most of your meals properly if you invest in the right 12-volt equipment. I covered the specific kit in another post, so I won't go through it all again here. The hygiene point around food is this: clean up immediately. Anything left in a pan or a container overnight in a cab becomes a smell problem by morning and a food safety problem by day two.
Plates and utensils can be rinsed with a small amount of water from a bottle and wiped dry, then stored in a sealable bag until you can wash them properly. It's not the same as a kitchen sink. It's manageable.
Mental hygiene
This isn't usually covered in practical guides, but it's part of the same picture. A clean, organised cab environment has a genuine effect on how a driver feels about tramping life. I noticed the difference between weeks where I'd let things accumulate — food wrappers on the passenger seat, wet socks on the dash, charging cables everywhere — and weeks where I'd maintained some order.
The disorganised version is demoralising in a way that compounds. The tidy version is, relatively speaking, fine. You can live in a truck if the truck is a reasonable environment to live in. If it isn't, five days feels like a long time.
Nobody at the induction told me any of this. Nobody at the induction talked about the third night in January at Immingham when the heating took 20 minutes to warm the cab and the lorry park was completely silent and you're three counties from home. They talked about the tachograph and the walkaround check and the route planning. All useful. But the soft infrastructure of tramping — how to maintain yourself and your environment across a working week away from home — that's the thing that determines whether people stay in tramping or leave it after six months.
I stayed. Once I got the kit right.