2021 West Bound - Day 25

Today was a long day and we really needed to be at Apple Annie's Country Store before they closed at 5:00... We made it with 15 minutes to spare. Whew. Suzanne's friends told us about the store when we were talking to them about Wilcox and our favorite Mexican restaurant - La Unica, so we picked up some pies to give to folks during our visit with Aptera tomorrow afternoon.

We are really looking forward to seeing Steve & Chris, and the other Aptera folks.

Today's drive:

The Drive West (3,650 miles):

The total dive so far (6,747 miles):

The details:

2021 West Bound - Day 24

With sadness we left the in-laws in Sugar Land...  I think they were ready for us to leave, but didn't want to say it. Honestly, we are ready to be home - to sleep in our own bed with our own pillows. 

On the first day out of Houston we try to meet up with an old high school friend who lives in Kerrville. This time our old high school friend Scott was in town (he's a navigator on off-shore boats and was off-shore every other time we passed through Kerrville). We had lunch with him, his wife, and son at a really nice restaurant in the old train depot building. Then we got to spend a couple of hours at his house and took some time to just hang out sitting on his front porch catching up and throwing the ball for his dog.

We arrived in Ozona and I dropped Suzanne off at the hotel and I went and charged up the car for a quick getaway tomorrow. We want to get into Wilcox before 5:00 because we hear that Apple Annie's Country Store has amazing apple pies and we want to pick some up before they close. We are also looking forward to having dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant of all time, La Unica.

Here is the map for today's drive:

Here is the map of the west-bound drive so far (3,047 miles):

And here is the total trip so far (6,145 miles):

Here are the details of the day:

2021 West Bound - Day 3 (through 23)

After several weeks in Sugar Land and Georgetown Texas visiting family, we are finally heading home. During our time visiting family we mainly charged at 120V with an occasional Supercharger session. It was great seeing everyone, and yes we were careful of COVID exposure.

Texas is big, but luckily everyone we visited was in the South East corner. Still we drove 1,150 miles in the 18 days.

Tomorrow, we will be heading out on our way home and will be stopping off to see an old friend in the Texas hill country (Kerrville). They just happen to be on our path to Ozona (our stop for the night).

2021 West Bound - Day 2

This drive had the most weather of any of the segments so far. We were in rain (some quite heavy) from Mobile, through Mississippi, and all the way to Baton Rouge. We got a nice lightening show in the morning too.

There was a pileup on the causeway over some swamps in Mississippi that caused us some delay, but other than that, everyone drove relatively sanely...

Here is the data for the day:

Now the trip is at 4,584 miles (at 308 Wh/mile / 191 Wh/km), about 2/3 of the way...

We will visit with our families until after Christmas, and I will start blogging again then (unless something interesting comes up while we are in Sugar Land).

Thank you for following.

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2021 West Bound - Day 1 (and Florida with friends)

We had a nice dinner with our sweet amazing friends that live in Melbourne Saturday night. On Sunday they took us to the beach ad we drank mimosas and chatted while enjoying the warm sand and beautiful weather. They took us to a seafood restaurant that they like and we had a nice late lunch. They then drove us around the area.

Crazy thing is that the server in the restaurant had is home town on his name tag (Port Aransas) and that go us talking about where he was from. It turns out that he lived a couple of streets over from where I lived when I was in high school! It really is a small world!

We headed off Monday morning for Mobile and had an uneventful drive, except for the crazy squall line and serious rain from east of Pensacola Florida all the way to Mobile. Tomorrow we will drive to my in-law's house (in Sugar Land, TX) where we will set up base for a while...

Here are the drive statistics for today:

Today's drive on the map:

The road trip so far (4076 miles):

2021 Florida Bound and around the farm

Thanksgiving with the family was great, and we had a memorial service for Laura at the family cemetery. It had been a long time since we were all together and it ended way too soon...  But everyone has their life to get back to. 

We then spent another week taking care of the built-up chores around the farm. Our forester had thinned one section of the pines earlier in the fall and it was nice to walk around in that tract with all the open space and light now getting in. Even with it being as dry as its been, the areas around the creek were still too wet, so I couldn't walk the property along it. 

We did get one really nice sunset over the cotton field while we were there. The beginning:

Later, zoomed in to the bright part:

It was also cool to see the preparation for another tract that we are going to plant in longleaf next fall. In case you don't know, longleaf pine is amazing. Gary gave us a book about it (Longleaf, Far as the Eye Can See: A New Vision of North America's Richest Forest) and I have fallen in love and now see longleaf pines everywhere! 

The machine that they used to knock down and cut up the scrub trees that have grown up since the last harvest of this tract was pretty amazing, well at least to me. Here's a short video of it at work:

That big drum chops up the trees into 6" long pieces and aerates the ground.

We are also raking and selling the pine straw in an older tract.

 

We ate at every fish place in the area and visited with cousins, and I was able to work (emails and Zoom) from there as long as I kept my video off. 

We left to visit friends half-way down Florida in Melbourne on Saturday morning, so you can see that drive below. We will hang out with them on Sunday and then start the first of our west-bound segment to Sugar Land Texas on Monday morning.

The drive to Melbourne was uneventful and we were met with steaks and (probably too many) beers.

Here's the trip so far:

2021 East Bound - Day 6

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:

2021 East Bound - Day 5

 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:

2021 East Bound - Day 4

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:

Here is the map for the drive today:

Here is the map for the trip so far:

2021 East Bound - Day 3

 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:

I like the graphic view myself, and it's a lot easier to put together.

Here's today's map:

Here's the map of the trip so far:

2021 East Bound - Day 2

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.

So I won't have a data summary for today, and it will mess up this segment's totals too... Grrr.

On the map you can see there's a big gap in today's data. You can see the straight lines between Flagstaff and Albuquerque. .

2021 East Bound - Day 1

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.

2021 - Getting Ready

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):

Notice that it dropped during the first 25,000 miles or so and has been pretty steady since then (with ups & downs).

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 

Thoughts on Tesla's "Enhanced Autopilot" (2019 version)

What it does well:
- It keeps the lane and the distance you set to the car ahead of you quite well in most circumstances.

• The open freeway with trucks and being passed by cars it was excellent. It knows what the speed limit is so you know if you are speeding (or how much you are speeding). Since we weren't in a hurry I usually set it for 3 over.
• In stop-and-go traffic it is amazing.  It will happily follow the car in front of you, stopping, starting, speeding up, slowing down - whatever the car in front is doing.

- It reduced my driving fatigue greatly

• I was able to focus on the other cars doing stupid things (which we saw a lot).
• I was able to pay more attention to cars overtaking us and was able to reliably make room for those entering the freeway.
• I did not need to worry if changing lanes was safe.  It would not let me change lanes if there was anything there. I just indicated and it would make the lane change. It did have issues with some of the lane changes some times though (see annoyances, below).

What it does not do well:
- Throughout the drive after an exit that we were not supposed to take, it would say that I should go from the slow to the fast lane to "stay on route". When I didn't do it, sometimes it would bing at me, but then after the on ramp it would stop saying I needed to move over.
- At every on ramp it would notice that the lane had suddenly gotten two lanes wide and move right to get in the middle of the lane.  This was just annoying at first, but after 2,000 miles of it, I was really ready for it to stop.
- When approaching some exits it acted like it thought we were supposed to take the exit, slowed down a lot and then decided that we were okay and sped back up. Luckily none of the times it did this were were being followed too closely.

Annoyances:
- Failed lane changes
- Breaking before a lane change when trying to do it quickly because the overtaking truck was 6" from my bumper and wanted past me. Seemed to mainly happen when I was changing back to the slow lane in front of a semi and I started the lane change "too close" for the autopilot system, so it's response was to slow down and then do the lane change. By slowing down, however, it was getting closer to the semi we were overtaking and it also got us ridiculously close the the tailgating truck wanting by.

All in all, totally worth it - especially when I compare it to the other "enhanced cruise" systems that are out there.  I've talked to people with the Honda, Toyota, & Lexus systems and they are not really happy with them when they hear what my car can do.

You see, they are trapped with the firmware that they were sold. My car gets updates and becomes more capable every time... THAT's the big difference.