This is the last drive to get to the farm for Thanksgiving. My daughters (& their husbands) are getting there too today.
After this, I won't be blogging again until next Friday when we drive down to middle Florida to visit with my buddy Brian.
Here's the drive for today:
Here's the drive for the whole trip so far:
Another short day from Meridian Mississippi to Auburn Alabama to stay with my childhood friend Larry.
Larry is one year younger than me and his brother Jake is one year older. Laura was one year younger than Larry, so we spanned 4 grades. When you are 13 years old, one year is a lot. Now, not so much. Larry & Anne drove us around town and showed us how much the place had grown. Larry also gave me a tour of the TV studio that he runs for the university. Very cool.
Jake is a great storyteller so we stayed up late drinking martinis and telling stories... That's why this blog entry is late. I didn't want to drink & write. That's almost as dangerous and drinking and driving!
Here are the details of the day:
Here's the day's map:
Continuing with the graphic presentation, here's an overview of today:
We slept in in this morning (it is a Sunday after all), and got to Meridian at 5:40. We ate lunch at the Applebees in Monroe Louisiana so the car charged up to pretty much 100%. They had two servers working the whole restaurant!
That meant that we only had to put a couple of minutes of charge in at the Pearl supercharger. We ended up a little longer there because I struck up a conversations with a couple from South Florida who were traveling to Dallas for Thanksgiving. When we got to Meridian we decided to go ahead and charge up so we wouldn't have to worry about it in the morning. So we watched a Netflix movie on the car's screen and get all the way up to 92%. I think all we will need is to be at 80% for the trip to Auburn (stopping in Montgomery). We are staying at a brand new hotel that's in an historic building in downtown Meridian. I'm not sure of the history, of it, but it's the tallest building in Meridian.
We went to the very cool rooftop bar for the hotel and sat at the firepit. We met a wonderful couple who were staying at the hotel too. We struck up an great conversation with them and really enjoyed ourselves. The bartender made a really good Manhattan too.
We also crossed over the 50,000 mile mark between Pearl and Meridian. Unfortunately we missed it,,
Here are the drives and charges for your viewing pleasure:
Now this is what a "regular" day of travel looks like:
Sleep, then a series of drives and charges to the destination.When I set this up the first time, I was shooting for about 650 miles a day. After I realized that the last day would be broken up by visiting my childhood friend in Auburn, I moved the stops around so that the drives got shorter as the trip went on. This makes Suzanne happy too, as after the third day she's starting to get a little tired of the driving. This leg, from Tucumcari, NM to Denton, TX is 2/3 the length of the first two days. Tomorrow is a short day tomorrow too.
I'm not sure whether y'all would rather see the data graphically, or in words - like the first day. So here's what it looks like graphically:
Here's today's map:
Here's the map of the trip so far:
This morning we got to experience the disadvantages of not staying at a hotel with destination charging. The car has cooled off quite a bit overnight (it was 35F when we left), so when we started driving it had to warm up the battery and it had to warm us up too. As we drove up to Flagstaff (up 7000 feet in elevation) the temperature continued to drop. We got to the supercharger in Flagstaff with 3% battery. The superchargers in Flagstaff are at a nice hotel, so we enjoyed the time walking around.
Suzanne had found an interesting restaurant to try out in Gallup called the Oasis Mediterranean. It was really good! When we got there it looked like it was closed, but inside it was doing a booming business. It was worth the 1-hour investment for a sit down lunch instead of eating in the car and keeping moving.
At the supercharger in Gallup there was a technician doing preventative maintenance on the 8 stalls there (in a Hampton Inn parking lot). It was cool chatting with him and peeking over his shoulder at the innards of the supercharger. It was exactly as I suspected - well laid out and easy to work on. He said that everything was logged and they used the logs to dispatch techs like him to replace contactors and other things that wear out, ahead of them failing. He said that they log how many times the contactor has been used and what current in interrupted. Pretty cool.
He mentioned that there was some construction on I-40 between there and Albuquerque. We didn't realize the magnitude of the INSANE backup due to construction that we were going to run into. On the east-bound side it was about an hour of stop-and-crawl driving, but the west-bound side had it much worse. They were backed up for at least 10-15 miles because of it! What a great time to block off lanes on an Interstate -The weekend before Thanksgiving!
When we finally got to the hotel in Tucumcari and I fired up the laptop, I discovered that TeslaFi (which I use to gather the data) was down for several hours today.
It was a pretty easy drive overall. We left right at 6:00 and arrived in Kingman at 5:41 (4:41 PT). There was a lot of fog in the central valley, but it cleared up once we got into the Mojave. As usual, we stopped at the Mexican restaurant at the charging station there and had a good lunch.
There was some construction between Mojave and Kingman, but it seemed worse for the folks going the other way than it did for us...
People always ask how long it takes to charge up, so I'll list our stops and what charge we added while we were there:
Drive from Home to Kettlemen City - 179 miles @ 320 Wh/mile (used 57.2 kWh)
Charge at Kettleman City (250kW!) - 28 minutes, from 8% to 81% (added 49.6 kWh)
Drive from Kettleman City to Mojave - 13 miles @ 349 Wh/mi (used 48.28 kWh)
Charge at Mojave (and lunch) - 46 minutes, from 12% to 95% (added 55.9 kWh)
Drive from Mojave to Barstow - 71 miles @ 326 Wh/mi (used 23.26 kWh)
Charge at Barstow - 5 minutes, from 61% to 74% (added 8.27 kWh). Added a little here to make sure to make it to Needles since we would be going 85.
Drive from Barstow to Needles - 180 miles @ 299 Wh/mi (used 44.82 kWh)
Charge at Needles - 21 minutes, from 9% to 61% (added 34.9 kWh)
Drive from Needles to Kingman - 64 miles @ 418 Wh/mi (used 26.55 kWh)
We got to Kingman with 22%. We grabbed dinner topped up and checked into the hotel.
Summarizing the drives for the day: 613 miles, 204.15 kWh used (the energy in 6.1 gallons of gasoline). So in eMPG we got 613/6.1 = 100.5 MPG at an average speed of 70.8 MPH.
This time we are planning on staying over in Texas at Suzanne's brother's house between Thanksgiving and Christmas. She hasn't seen her mother in 2 years (thank you COVID) and since I can work from there... why not?
We are leaving next week (on the 18th) so lots of checklists are being created and items checked off.
This trip will take the car past it's 50,000 mile basic warranty (it's at 48,000 miles now). The only issues with the car have been a weirdness with the passenger seat, and they upgraded me to version 3 of the AI computer. Mine had version 2.5 when I bought it. They came to my office and replaced the passenger seat in the parking lot. Super easy. Didn't even need to go to the service center. The warranty for the battery and drive unit is 10 years or 80,000 miles (and better than 70% capacity remaining). Since I've lost 20 miles of range over 48,000 miles (6.67%), I don't think the battery is going to be wearing out before the warranty.
Here's the battery degradation report from TeslaFi (what I've been using to gather data since I bought the car):
Every time I make this trip I think of my friend Steve Fambro (also a Georgia boy) and his company Aptera. They are working on a 1,000 mile range car! If you are interest in getting one, please use my referral code when you make your reservation, so I can get credit for bringing you to them: https://lz953.isrefer.com/go/preorder/fUEnT8KV
