Planning the stops on a long road journey

The two-minute stop is a lay-by or a slip road, used when somebody needs it urgently and nothing else will do. It solves one problem and does nothing for the journey. The ten-minute stop is fuel, a lavatory and back in the car; it keeps a schedule and it is what you take when the arrival time is tight.

The twenty-minute stop is the one that changes the second half of the day. Standing up properly, walking a couple of hundred yards, a coffee that is not consumed in the car. On a five-hour journey that is not a luxury, it is the thing that makes the last two hours bearable.

• Two minutes: solves one problem, changes nothing
• Ten minutes: keeps a schedule, no recovery
• Twenty minutes: resets the rest of the journey
• Over thirty minutes: the day starts to feel long again

Northbound on the M1 the useful cluster is between junctions 11 and 17: Toddington, Newport Pagnell and Watford Gap, all long established and all busy at peak. Further north, Leicester Forest East sits over the carriageway around junction 21, with Donington Park and Tibshelf serving the stretch above it.

On the A1(M) the pattern is different and the gaps are longer. Peterborough is the substantial one on the southern half, and further north Blyth and Wetherby are the usual choices. The A1 is a road where running low on anything is a poor idea, because the intervals between facilities are genuinely long compared with the M1.

Any service area at the exact moment the school holidays start. Any of them between about half past twelve and half past one on a Friday, when the car parks fill and a twenty-minute stop becomes forty. And the smaller sites on the M1 at peak, where the queue for the lavatories is longer than the queue for the coffee.

It is usually better to drive an extra fifteen minutes to a quieter site than to stop at a busy one. That runs against the instinct to take the first opportunity, and it is right more often than not on a Friday afternoon in August.

On a journey under about two and a half hours a stop is usually twenty minutes wasted. London to Birmingham, London to Bristol or Manchester to Leeds are all comfortably done in one go, and adding a service station lengthens the day without improving it. Ask, but expect the answer to be no.

On a tight schedule with a hard deadline the same applies: a stop is slack you may need later. Driving to a wedding at two, the sensible plan is to arrive with time in hand and wait somewhere pleasant nearby, rather than to spend twenty minutes at Watford Gap and arrive with none.

And on a very late run, little is open and the stop achieves less. Between midnight and five in the morning the useful thing is a five-minute stand outside the car in the fresh air rather than a hunt for somewhere serving coffee, and the chauffeur will take that whether or not the passenger wants one.