In order fully to appreciate this review, it is necessary for you to suspend your disbelief. This…read morereview has nothing to do with unknowable facts or unobserved reality; rather, it is concerned with people making the best choices with the (admittedly limited) information they had at the time.
If you were about to take a drink of yellow Gatorade, and someone you trusted told you not to drink the yellow Gatorade, because it was horse urine, you would be a fool to drink the yellow Gatorade. Even if it turned out that the yellow Gatorade was yellow Gatorade and not horse urine. Why? Because you took an unnecessary risk and went against the only information you had at the time. On with the review.
I had stopped here for gas on a few occasions on my way back from SoCal to San Francisco. At the time, about 75 percent of my cross-state trips were on the 5, so my 101 gas-station knowledge was limited and ever-changing--mainly due to all the gas stations in King City playing musical chairs with their branding. At the time, I hadn't yet discovered San Paso Truck Stop, so I thought this was my last freeway-easy opportunity to get gas for a while, and I knew how to get here from the freeway and how to get back onto the freeway from here.
In other words, this place, though high-priced, was a decent stop, a solid three stars. All of this ended in January 2021, when I was driving back from COVID bubbling with my parents for the fall and holidays of 2020 to a desolate San Francisco. Remember that time? In California? The COVID rate was way up from the holiday season; vaccines weren't available yet; I had recently found out that one of my mom's former colleagues had died of COVID, and the mother of a friend of mine was in the hospital with COVID.
Amid all this, I needed gas, and I needed to use the bathroom. Third Base was where I stopped. I pumped my gas, and when I was about to walk into the store, a man without a mask walked out and proceeded to have a coughing fit right as he passed me. I was annoyed that he was unmasked and at his rudeness for not even covering his mouth or turning away as I passed by.
When I entered the store, an employee was right next to the door. He wasn't wearing a mask either, and he was rubbing his upper lip. (Again, this is at the height of California's big post-holidays outbreak.) He smiled widely at me and asked if I needed anything. I told him I just needed to use the restroom, and he walked toward me. I told him to stop, and he did. I told him I was uncomfortable that he wasn't wearing a mask (I was more concerned that he was rubbing his face right beneath his nostrils) and that I just needed to know where the bathroom was. He fast-walked past me and arrived right at the bathroom door, and he opened it and held it open for me. I told him I really didn't want to be that close to him, but he insisted that he wasn't sick and that I would be fine. Still very annoyed, I rushed past him into the bathroom.
When I left, he was chatting it up with another customer (also not wearing a mask) at the cash register. Eventually, I would find out that Paso Robles was one of those COVID-restriction holdouts, where anti-mask and anti-gathering-restrictions sentiment were very high.
So what happened? Nothing. I wouldn't get COVID until December 2022, and I was still masking more or less all the time by that point, although I was otherwise living my life pretty normally. With what I know now, my experience at Third Base wasn't particularly dangerous, but based on what we knew (or thought we knew) at the time, this place was putting its customers' and its employees' health at risk by not following state (and I assume county) mask mandates. I was also uniquely perturbed by how far the employee seemed to go out of his way to make me feel uncomfortable.
My regular northbound gas stop has changed twice since my last visit here, and no matter how gourmet their sandwiches or vast their wine selection, I won't ever step foot inside here again. What if they decide to question the food-handling regulations? There is a hepatitis A outbreak in L.A. right now, and we all know how hep A is spread.