Road tripping the $15K Tesla: Pt.6

 If you missed the beginnings of this series it's HERE.

Day 17: Home again, home again, jiggety electrons.

Escape from New York!  er, Chicago, whatever.

In the original plan, we would exit the whacky hotel early, stash stuff in the car, spend the day knocking around Chicago and then exit the city before we had to pay another day's ransom in the car-park. Stay outside somewhere that's not $270/night.
It kinda worked. The elevator repairmen were there bright and early, moving stuff around about 6:30 and really going at it hammer and tongs by 7: or a little after, so plan Exodus got going early. We walked out north toward the 'Old Town Triangle.'

We almost immediately came across a small local park. Look closely, one of the dog walkers isn't doing it right. There were more dogs in the park on this nice weekday morning than people.

<-This was a nice set of row-houses along the way. It reminds one; the houses, tree'd neighborhoods, small parks, of street scenes just off the main thoroughfares in Paris. Almost eerie how similar it feels. Some of the people out walking were even speaking French.

We saw our first 'EL' (Chicago elevated trains) up close and even a station somewhat farther in the distance. You can deaf-ly hear why you wouldn't want to live next door.

We didn't see any spectacularly awesome old houses in Old Town, of course we didn't do any actual research to determine what might be there. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be.

Coming back we walked out to Shore line Drive and then South to it's intersection with Michigan Ave, the really Ritzy end of Miracle Mile. Being well over 10,000 steps already at 10:AM we stopped to rest in a tiny park. What we originally assumed to be yet another church turned out to be the city's water tower from the mid-1800's. The original water works building is just behind it and exhibits the same crazy period style. 
Having been built (overbuilt?) of stone these were the only public works in the area to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

That may be the Sears Tower in the background. Didn't care enough to look. At that point defeets was tired enough to call it a day, despite, after some breakfast it's not even 11:AM.
So we went to extract the car, pay the extortion and exit the city.

It still seems almost offensive to pay more for parking than we did for entire hotel stays elsewhere, including parking. "Hey Fella, we're Chicago and we're big and important, also f**k you."

Since the exodus occurred much earlier than anticipated (more walking was just NOT going to happen) we decided that the original plan "Stay somewhere close." wasn't necessary and we set the sights further out. Like 355 miles.

If you choose the right route out of town, you drive 4 miles further, but pay no tolls at all. Since we still have the dealer cardboard 'plates' and temporary tagging, toll road organizations would not like us very much. Seemed worth the four miles...
As we drove a long the I-55 route out we saw many Historical Route 66 signs. We laughed. The cheap way to exit is also one of the oldest. A quick charging stop in Peru IA and off on I-80 we go.

Davenport/Moline/RockCity IA was rather closer than we expected, but we didn't see much of it.
They do have a surprisingly large river there. Turns out it's pretty big even before the Missouri confluence. We saw Iowa City a bit more but that was mainly due to a charging stop. 

West of the Mississippi we noticed the tree coverage getting back to what we'd seen in West Oklahoma and Eastern Missouri.  Stands to reason as we're directly North of there. The tree coverage is about as thick but the trees are a little taller and not quite as densely branched/leafed. Still not sure what most of them are.

We ended up in Clive, just West of Des Moines IA. We chose a Super8 Motel (first time) due to it's having 8 on a scale of 10 in the reviews column. Everything else in the area was $50 more, or had low-mid 6's in the reviews (that low is often yucky.)
We hadn't been to a Chili's Restaurant in many years. Not sure why, it was probably the best food on the trip so far. Not expensive either ($35 for two) we'll definitely do that again, after the couple weeks, required to digest what happens when it's really good -and- you get a lot...

Day 17 Totals: 355 Miles, 248 Wh/mi. (75-80 MPH freeways!) 88 KWh.

Day 18: Whole lotta nuttin'

Queue the excitement!  Yep, just line up, and...

Yep, that's it. There was a tree, and clouds and lots of bugs on the windshield.

Pretty much the high point of the day.

We did get off to an odd start, with the car in a cellular dead zone overnight, it didn't quite know where to head for charging, so we headed off and ... it pointed to a charging station right next to where we spent the night. However we didn't figure that out until about 10 miles down the road.
"Can't we reach the next one?" No.

So we came back and charged.  Added 22 miles to a day which didn't need any additions.

We passed Omaha, and Lincoln NE. It was probably a big day for rivers: The Des Moines, Racoon, Missouri, Two branches of the Platte ... if anyone was paying attention instead of droning along slack jawed. Mainly just a whole lotta driving.

Our good buddies at Nebraska roads are doing some serious work on I-80 and have temporarily turned about 50 miles of it into a two lane, which oddly enough didn't slow us down much. 68 MPH instead of 78 MPH. Land was mostly flat, occasionally rolling. It seemed to get a little dryer looking as the day went westward. Some increase in evergreen percentage in the trees.

NE has many many ponds near the interstates where they have dug out gravel, sometimes for a mile, and when they're done 'mining' the gravel out to a 20-or-so foot depth, they make a pond of it and (we assume) route a stream to it, or maybe ground-water levels? There's massive stacks of gravel showing near the uncompleted ones. Some of these ponds look like they've been there 50 years or more. Some seem to be stocked with fish. Never seen the like.

Seriously though that was probably the most exciting finding of the day.

Another gratuitous cloud shot. We spent quite a bit of time looking at the clouds.

And yes all the shots are from inside the car. It doesn't look like it but it was 90 deg.F and 90% Humidity and venturing outside was for fools who needed to plug in the charging cord. It was also blowing, gusting 30-40 from the front and side. Pushing the cars around. Semi-truck boogaloo anyone?

The plan, such as it was, included driving through to Denver today. Didn't make it. Ran out of interest, or daylight or something in Big Springs NE. Motel 6 to the rescue.

Day 18 Totals:  502 miles, 278 Wh/mi. 140 KWh.   Monster headwinds and 80 MPH does not make for efficient cruising. Most power used in a day, by far!

Day 19: The Setup

Heck with Denver, press on regardless!

A mighty plan was hatched some few days back, but it seemed impossible. Darkness was on the face of the implementers.  And then, like clarion call, a thought shouted out: "Why not just drive through this way dummy?"     
And so a revised revision to the re-visited plan was wrought, and it was good.

The original problem was finding interesting things we might do on the way back from Chicago.
The other requirements were that it not take too much time, be possible with the vehicle's range and charging opportunities, not cause 10-12 hour driving days, and of course not cost a whole lot 'cause we pretty much nuked the budget already. Various ideas were floated, none more appealing than trying to route through Yellowstone or Grand Teton on the way back.

Problem 1 is that they're not well aligned for east-west travelers, being ensconced in a freakn'gynormous mountain range (you may have heard of it), and so the major freeways don't exactly route through there. They are not far from each other and on the same highway-ish road (191), so it's not unreasonable to visit both on a single swing-through.

Problem 2 was charging. Spending a bunch of time on the screen in the car while awaiting charge completion showed that there was a charging location on I-80, Rock Springs that is on one end of 191, another charger in Jackson WY, just south or the parks, one at West Yellowstone just to the north and then Bozeman MT on I-90 (and 191) so it looks like the charging situation is at least possible. Great care would need be taken to not over-speed from Rock Springs to Jackson.

Problem 3 was that any lodging anywhere near the parks is basically $300 and up, which kinda blows the budget. Things tend to be rather nice in that bracket, but that's well outside the economic reality, especially after Chicago. We did consider camping, but doing the first real 'trial-by-fire' on that setup in an alpine setting with 22 deg.F lows and limited vehicle charge (which provides heat in 'Camping Mode,"  see post) seemed unwise. The trick then was to find something 'reasonable' that was close enough to make a full-ish day in the parks feasible.
Basically just trying out each little town on potential routes until something popped up.

With a name like Jackalope Motor Lodge it's gotta be good. $80

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Once that "Close enough" endpoint for the day was established, the rest was just basic EV travel. Two hours stints between 25 min. charging stops like usual.
Today's menu was Big Springs, Sidney, Cheyenne WY, Laramie, Rawlins, and Rock Springs.
The day was helped by having an extra hour added in by our good friends at Mountain Time.

Though we have to make it almost 200 mi. from Rock Springs WY to Jackson WY on a single charge (very up hill and into the prevailing winds), there's nothing to say we can't spend the night along the way, which is where Pinedale WY comes in. Nice town. Home to the Jackalope Motor Lodge. 

The motel is a really nice place. A young family bought it a couple years ago and put major effort into upgrading it. They also learned things from AirBnb and similar to make it so they don't have to 'man the desk' all the time like most other little mom'n'pop motels. It's very clever,   and humorous.

There's mountains in them thar distance. And more bugs on the windshield.

Along the way we cast off the last vestiges of trees and green and embraced the grasslands of the plains, just like we thought it would be starting out. then as we climbed toward the continental divide (8600 ft?) and as we climbed it got colder and dryer and browner. Much like Arizona.

The last leg from Rock Springs to Pinedale had to be done at 60 MPH to preserve as much charge as possible.

This concludes setting up the big day and photos of big things wild natural and otherwise. Tomorrow.
That's for the next post, where we leave these three days of boring travel behind.

Day 19 Totals 518 miles (whew!) 288 Wh/mi. 150 KWh. 

On to the last post: Grand Finale!