Road tripping the $15K Tesla: Pt.4

First post in the series is --HERE-- good place to start.

Day 11: Dio del Museums

Amarillo,
Is 'Eh, kinda ordinary.'
Nothing really special to see; downtown medium size city generic.

At least on the Rt66 path we were on. The Texas Route 66 Visitor Center (on 6th St. natch) was pretty good. A lot of kitsch and wall art, some of it good. Best source of Texas Rt66 TShirts we  have seen.
Much of Texas R66 is unimpressive, mostly the I-40 was built right next to it (with '66 providing all the materials transportation) except at the little towns. The '66 remainders are 'Frontage Roads' next to the Interstate.  Seeing the towns is often worthwhile. The Frontage roads? Not so much.

The red line points to us, single EV. Waaaay in the back. Look closely ;-)

We stopped for a charge on exiting Amarillo. It was at the biggest (hey, it's Texas) fueling station/Truck stop we've ever seen. The photo shows about a quarter of the car fueling, there were 22 cars being served and it's less than half full. Trucking is of similar size, not shown. 5? 6? restaurants, a store, trucker lounge with showers - etc. And one EV.

Shamrock TX.

North Texas is the small part of the state (can we say that?), only about 200 miles across. Just as we were about to leave the state there was a charging stop behind this restored Conoco station with attached (also restored, just for show, not in use) Cafe with a Visitor Center and gift shop in between. We went for salads at Subway whilst charging occurred.

 

Panorama of Texas major cash crop. Click for larger.

As mentioned earlier when we were entering Texas there were red flashing lights as far as the eye can see.
Windmills milling Electrons. North Texas largest cash crop, according to some sources. Here we are almost a hundred miles (and 14 hours) later and they're still going on.
It's hard to see here without blowing up the photo, but there's lines of them and then ranks of lines behind and those ranks 5? 8? deep head out toward the horizon. The eye losses resolving power before Texas runs out of windmills. Difficult to convey how impressive this is.

Elk City, OK. has an entire retro mini city in town

Many miles and several town tours later we come to Elk City. This is physically the largest Museum/Visitor Center on the route. 

The restored, moved buildings make up a small town recreated to try and give a feel for the 1890's through 1940 period. It's not as explanatory as the Museum in Kingman, so you don't get as complete understanding of the area, the road building, the history, but it does have many more exhibits of cars and motorcycles and Doctors offices, farm machinery and period buildings. Definitely worth the stop.

A few of about 20 buildings facing in on the 'town square'

We rolled into Oklahoma City before dark (for a change) although the direction of approach didn't present many sights to see. Maybe tomorrow?

Another Howard Johnson's. It was the only one on the lower end of the price scale that didn't have recent reviews/ complaints regarding bed-bugs or roaches. Actually pretty nice, if $70 instead of the (many) competing places at $60.

That's what it looks like. In their 1956 imagination. Painting in lobby...

One thing we noticed in Texas and OK. Gas prices are $3.05/Gal. In Ventura CA they were $5.05  Now we know there's 'regional variation' but this seems absurd. How much does it cost to run a tanker truck from here to there? $4000? even if it's $5000 you'd clear $15K buying gas here and selling it in CA. Sure there's more to it than that, but it still makes no sense

Day 11 totals: 285 miles, 224 Wh/mi. 65 KWh.

Day 12: Terror of Tiny Towns.    er, that's 'tour' not terror, well, sort of...

Man that was a lot of towns in one day.

Little breakfast action at the HoJo's (yes, with GF options, amazing) and off to charge'le'car

No, that's not us. We were just sitting there charging.

This is what happens when you run the car (not ours) completely out of battery (to the point it shuts down) and call Tesla Road Service or AAA and they (eventually) pick up the car and drop it off at the charger. Then someone has to jump the 12V battery enough so the computers boot up and you can begin to actually use the Supercharger, which will run -really- slow for the first 20-30 min. to protect the battery and make sure everything is OK. First time we've seen this. Complication: The tow truck can't for some reason transport the car's owner so they have to find alternate means. 

Oklahoma City was nice enough, but things get much nicer north/east of city in Edmond. Very impressive area, quite a bit newer and with lots of high tech industries. Also the trees and vegetation just get better and more lush as you head from OK City toward Tulsa.

Everywhere but everywhere not cleared for farmland, is solid forest. About 90% deciduous.

Haven't seen this much solid green since home, or maybe some areas around Atlanta.

Also, the road surfaces for the Route 66 roads were consistently (almost) excellent from OK City up through Tulsa and on to Joplin.

Tulsa downtown. One church per every 5 buildings.

Little charging stop and lunch in Tulsa. It had one of the nicest downtown's we've seen on the trip. In fact all of Oklahoma exceeded expectations by a considerable margin. For Route 66 roads and towns and general 'look and feel' it rivals and may exceeded Arizona. Especially for the road surfaces.
Doesn't feel as 'western' of course.

The other number doesn't show here on the left, but Regular is $2.88/gallon. -> Yowza.
Guess it's oil country.

Onward through the cavalcade of small towns.  As you might imagine Route 66 goes through just about every small town on the map, and of course the interstates bypass all of them. Arcadia was kinda nothing, Luther was nice, Wellston had a nice downtown (and an aerospace museum) and Chandler was even nicer and had a big car show and celebration going on. We only got lost slightly due to detours, as far as you know ;-)

Stroud and Bristow were Ok, and there is  SERIOUS political race going on there for county sheriff. Signs everywhere.

Heart of 66 Car Museum

Next up was Sapulpa, of course! Actually the town wasn't much but they do have a neat car museum just east of town. It was focused more on local car history and not so much on the historical Route 66 stuff. Nicely done from what we could see but not worth the entry if you're not the car nut.

Don't recall much about the next several towns.

Mostly just moseying along. If we didn't have the guide book we wouldn't know the names of half of them.

Side note: In the last three days we've seen the Rio Grande, Pecos, Canadian, Red and Arkansas rivers. The first and last of these are the only ones that looked like much. Everything else we'd have called a creek back home. In places the Colorado was a bit more than a creek, but not by much. Tiny rivers like the McKenzie dwarf almost all of these. Just seemed interesting...

Vinita had a pretty decent old style downtown, but the real winner for the day was Miami Oklahoma. The town seems fairly vibrant, the old buildings go on for several blocks, were nicely done to begin with and seem very well maintained since. Nice job!

Carthage County seat

And don't forget Baxter Springs, Riverton and Galena Kansas, Not really a lot going on except in Baxter, which is fairly large. These are Lead and Zinc mining towns. The only three towns you see for the 20 miles that Route66 grazes the corner of Kansas.

Joplin MO is just long, standard old R66 faire. There's probably a lot going on there we didn't see.

Winner for most impressive town or county seat goes to Carthage, where we're spending the night. It takes up an entire city block and has a silly looking star on the top.

Lots of GREAT old houses in the town too.

This is the cool/kitschy '50's retro motel we found just outside of Carthage. Right on the only lake in the area, it does have a distinct retro vibe going on. Rotary style phones, 50's colors. The AC is slightly more modern, but not by much. Is it worth $72? Sleep will tell.

Day 12 totals: 248 miles, 219 Wh/mi. 57 KWh.

Day 13: The slow lane.

The "Best Budget Inn' motel was really good, despite the dorky name. They're trying to get the Route 66 association (there is such a thing, apparently dedicated to making things just like they used to be, and they have money) to kick in some dough to re-establish the original Lakeside Motel sign, which had a lot of neon and would cost $60K to put up. A lot for a tiny (12 room?) mom&pop operation. 

Much of the Route 66 roads (and unlike some states most of it still exists, usually under another name) in Missouri are not exactly the fast route, and that really showed today. 300 miles isn't all that long a day, in the general run of things. ...and to be fair that's 90% of the distance across the state.
Sunday most of the attractions of any sort were closed. Church parking lots were surely at capacity though. So it was mostly a driving day   ...at 45-48 MPH.

Between the 25-35 zones in the many small towns and the typically curvy roads where 55 was pretty rare, a day long average of 40 is actually doing good. Until you work out that's around eight hours. Add lunch stop and charging, only one, in Rolla MO....

Thing about EVs though, while they're really efficient normally, when you go about 45 MPH they're really REALLY efficient. We averaged 178 Wh/mi. over the day. To put that in perspective our Leaf, no efficiency slouch averaged 3.7 miles per KWh. Converting the above 'Tesla' number into the same format that's 5.6 miles per KWh.   150% better?
On the road in this area Tesla Superchargers it's around 37 cents/KWh. So that's basically six cents per mile at the SC rate here. About 1.7 cents at our 'at home' electric rate.

Again for perspective a Toyota Prius doing it's usual 50MPG is at 7-8 cents/mile here, or about 12 cents on the west coast. Um, remember those gas-price posts?

Devil's Elbow Bridge, Built ca. 1923. Refurbished in 2013 

Only early '20's original span on Route 66 still in use and open to traffic.
We had to stop to see how different this "Devil's Elbow" is to the one in Oregon. Rather different it turns out.  It's a tight turn in the Big Piney River that they had a 'devil of a time' getting logs to float through when logging to support WW1 got going. The bridge came later in 1923 to support the logging town and it was incorporated into early Route 66 as it was one of the few bridged and (relatively) easy routes through the area.

Big? Piney River, from the bridge.

The sharp bend is on the other side where the photo didn't come out, of course.

This does bring up that the whole day was green as heck. Basically trees everywhere except (mostly) where it was cleared intentionally at some point or by fire. We may hit the real grasslands of the plains on the way back, This is great for now. Really beautiful countryside.
We did notice the makeup of the trees as we've driven from Tulsa to St Louis. It started with relatively short, all about 30-35 feet and mostly round-ish deciduous trees. Evergreens were maybe 5% of the total there and more like 20% toward St. Louis. The trees also got taller as we came down. Getting toward St Louis the average height is probably closer to 45-50 feet. There are exceptions of course. Is it lower elevations? Longer time since last fire-clearing? Different soil? More rain? Less wind? We don't know.

We reached the Extended Stay Hotel, clever name that, around 7:30. Long day. Everything here seems a bit more expensive. Like about $10 more than the earlier averages and the taxes inside the city are a bit higher. Think mid-$80's for their King kitchenette. There were others $4 cheaper.

Looks like our big day in St Louis is going to get rained out tomorrow. Bummer. It's been totally awesome weather so far, except the 103.deg.F day in CA and the wind storm in Vegas. We'll see how it goes.

Totals for day 13: 296 miles, 178 Wh/mi. 54 KWh

Next up:  Part 5 of course!