East Bound - Day 2

Got on the road at 8:00 and arrived in Flagstaff at 10. As we climbed higher and higher up to the "Arizona Divide" oddly there were more and more trees. Usually there are less tree at altitude, but it must rain more up here than in the desert.

The autopilot performed great, except for a couple of times where the lane markings were obliterated (I couldn't tell where the lane markings were either). Suzanne had been counting the times that the system aborted or hesitated during a lane change, so I counted the total number of times that I told the systems to make a lane change. So far on the trip she has counted 7. I counted the times I told it to do a lane change but quit at 70, around Bakersfield. I'm estimating 120 for the first day and at least 50 more so far today. So that's a 95.9% success rate.

The superchargers in Flagstaff are in the Courtyard Hotel parking lot, so we hung out in the nice lobby while the car filled up. It didn't charge at 120 kW, only a max of 90. I guess because it was 40° outside?

We put a little more in the battery here since we are going to take a side trip to Meteor Crater National Monument... We also stopped and grabbed some lunch before leaving Flagstaff.

We spent more time than I thought we would at Meteor Crater. The visitors' center has grown quite a bit since I stopped there on my way west in 2000. There's a museum and a gift shop, in addition to the extra viewing areas.

This is a 180' panorama. The thing is HUGE!

This is one of the recovered fragments of the nickle-iron meteor.

Next stop was Gallup. The superchargers were in the parking lot of a hotel. We didn't spend much time there, as there wasn't much to do.

By the time we got to Albuquerque we were ready to eat dinner, so we were pleased to see that the superchargers were in an Applebee's parking lot. As we ate dinner the car almost charged to 100%.

The drive to Tucumcari was like last night's drive...  Just us and lots of trucks. The hotel we are staying has "destination chargers" that they say we can charge at all night. So when we get on the road we will be completely full!

Totals for the day:

659.3 miles, 184 kWh, 279 Wh/mi (or 3.6 miles/kWh)

07:59-21:10, so 13 hours 11 minutes trip time (so 59 miles/hr average)

Totals for the trip:

1,269.9 miles, 358 kWh, 282 Wh/mi (or 3.5 miles/kWh)

Total trip time: 24 hrs 26 minutes (so 51.8 miles/hr average)