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!

Road tripping the $15K Tesla: Pt.3

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

Day 8:  FINALLY, headed east again.

Starting out at the Kingman Route66 Museum and Visitor Center. This is built into the old powerhouse that (1907 onward) powered the town and surrounding area.

If you look close, a BUNCH of Tesla SuperChargers on the left.

They did a really good job on this Museum. One of the rare times when the entrance fee was worthwhile. They cover the history of the area beginning around 1520, the initial, what would become Rt66 surveying in the mid-1800's, construction of the roads, and quite a section about the dust-bowl migration.

1934(?) farm truck that actually made the migration.

The traffic increased from 1930 on and there's much coverage of the stores, infrastructure and attractions that grew up with it until the decline began in the 60's and 70's.
There's also a fairly extensive Electric Vehicle history exhibit and some coverage of the actual powerhouse history. A very good start for the day and (so we're told) the best museum about Rt66 in the world. We'll see.

Heading out on a very original, mostly unrestored section of the road through Peach Springs there's miles&miles of

Uh yeah, more of that. Some group put up replicas of maybe a dozen of the the BurmaShave sign-sets that were common in the 20's and 30's along about 40 miles of the road. Pretty amusing. There was one outcrop of the very red soil/rocks common in the Grand Canyon, but there was more traffic than we cared to deal with so no picture.

Once the road, previously about 4500-5000 feet altitude, started the climb to Flagstaff (~7000 ft.) the rocks and the vegetation changed markedly. It starts to look almost exactly like the areas around Sisters and Bend OR.

Lots of pine forest, Looks like Ponderosa Pine to us. The Flagstaff area, which we had given almost no thought to before, other than knowing it as the location of the Lowell Observatory, turns out to be really nice. One of the surprises of the trip so far. 

It was a short day, even with all the Rt66 side trips, on account of laundry to do.
Still ran through most of the battery due to elevation gain and 80MPH stretches.
It's nice that EV's don't drop-off performance-wise like other vehicles do at high elevations.
                       Wish we could say the same about human lungs - etc.

The Wyndham Hotels phone app popped up a deal on a Baymont by Wyndham in Flagstaff. $76.

Large, nicely if not luxuriously appointed and clean and quiet. Those last two are what Motel 6 lacked the night before 

Day 8 totals: 192 miles, 228Wh/mi. 45 KWh. Not home of the cheap charging: $21. Darn those first world problems.

Day 9:

Flagstaff old town wasn't much, and our intrepid explorers failed to note that The Lowell Observatory

would be open in the evening, even when laundry was done. Like in the dark. To see stars. Duh.

So going there in the daytime didn't actually work all that well because they don't open until noon, having been up half the night.

So this delightful shot of the Observatory itself (the education center is left of this, unshown) is as close as we got to any of it. Bummer Dude!

After a short moment of silence to recover from this immense oversight, we continued on.
The mother road quickly drops down out of the pine forest and we're back in rather dull sagebrush country.

Yes, the scale is confusing. Those bushes are about 2 ft. high.

There are occasional breaks in the flat desert and red rock formations begin to appear. This one is about half way to Winslow at a rest stop. There were little critters running around the rocks but they're too fast for our photo finger.

Although few fine sights were to be had. The town's big draw is a restored Harvey House now known as La Posada (which is also the train station)  and some of the historical memorabilia and rooms are carried over from the WWII re-establishment of the Harvey House system. They were also famous for their treatment and promotion of Women during periods (1876-1948) where that wasn't necessarily common.

Moving right along, there's a different kind of architecture leaving town:

This may be the third Wigwam cottages motel we've seen on the trip. Certainly the nicest. It's difficult to see here but they have restored period cars dotted around and other period bric-a-brack.
In keeping with the themes of the trip, we'd probably have stayed in one if it had happened to be the right part of the day.  Oh well...

Heading for Gallup, the scenery began to change. Thank goodness.

Interesting rock formations and colors

It looks redder in person. We had to tour Gallup of course. The song, after all...
     Not a whole lot there. Lunch, their Dennys was actually open.            ...It was pretty good too. 

Later, some charging in the mighty metropolis of Milan after crossing the continental divide. The divide doesn't look like much here, More dramatic north in the Rockies.

This is the first pull-in charging station we've seen, the 'normal' ones are all back-in. 
Somehow this is supposed to help with the non-Tesla cars that are now using the Superchargers. Mainly Ford, Hyundai/Kia and Rivian at this point. If they back in? Maybe they use the charger on the 'wrong' side? Hmmm, that still uses up two stalls. Not sure how this is supposed to work. 

The "Genuine Indian Trading Post' was closed. We were devastated.

The rest of the day took us down through the 'old' pre-1937 version of Rt66 to Los Lunas, a MUCH bigger town than one might expect. It looks like Amazon and a couple other big distributors have opened large warehousing/sorting operations here and the town is booming.

We had our first glimpse of The Rio Grande, and in fact we crossed it again heading north. Apparently shifts in the river and new bridges north of here cause the road traffic to be re-routed after '37. This was, from Milan eastward by far the nicest section of roadbed we've seen for any section of 'real' Route 66  Kudos to New Mexico roads folks.

Night in Albuquerque, in a Hotel named, somewhat appropriately: Querque and yes it is somewhat quirky. Not too bad, and the reviews were much less awful than many others in the area, especially the under $100 ones we frequent. $79 ain't bad at all, which is good because it was a LONG day.

Day 9 totals: 398 Miles, 218 Wh/mi. 89 KWh.   
First part of the day, much high speed and up to the divide was around 248wh/mi.
Later part, slower and down from the divide was 149wh/mi. the lowest leg we've seen.

Day 10: Amarillo by Evening

Late evening it turns out. This time of year Arizona is on Pacific time, so only the 300 miles of New Mexico are the Mountain Time sandwich between that and Texas, which of course has it's own time zone. Oops, no it's Central Time. Pretty sure they've thought about having their own time zone though. Everything's bigger in Texas, especially egos. Oddly enough most folks are really nice.

The day started really well, mostly because the Quirky bed was unusually (for a motel) comfortable.
The usual "GF Need Not Apply" breakfast nook, and we're off to '66' through old downtown, which wasn't much and are on the old road toward Santa Fe, where brunch awaits.

We couldn't figure out what these trees are that line the Rio Grande, mostly near the river.

This is what ten bucks gets you at Dennys, or $8.50 w/discount card.

...and not just here in "The Land of Enchantment' this meal was pretty common throughout the trip.

We may not be giant fans of Albuquerque, but Santa Fe seems really nice, It's up into the pine forest somewhat like Flagstaff, except with a SW Native bent. We kinda prefer Flagstaff, but maybe that's because it reminds so much of Bend/Sisters OR. 

The guide book led us astray twice in Santa Fe, so more time was spent sorting the route than exploring. Of course that is a form of exploration, just not of the parts of town you might want to see.

There were dark clouds on the horizon as we started up toward Santa Fe, and by the time we left it was getting darker and darker.
Awww, reminds one of home...

Next charging stop was in mighty Las Vegas, NM. Before starting out we had no ideas there was such a place. Nice little town on the Pecos, just a bit off '66, but hey they had chargers.

On the way there though was the highlight of the day. The Pecos Pueblo National Monument. Worth a visit!

This is a bit of the 1690's church restored. Wall is the original church boundary

The Pecos Pueblo was basically the biggest thing in the (almost state-sized) area from roughly 1300AD on, although the people had lived in the area for several hundred years at that point. Parts of it still exist but are going through archaeological excavation, off the photo to the left. It was huge - town sized.
Trade was big with both the plains natives and the coastal tribes. The Spaniards started to intrude around 1540 and built a big church (with native, shall we say 'uncompensated' labor) and tensions built over the decades. Finally things came to a head in 1680, the various pueblos banded together and threw out the Spaniards and their hangers-on. The only native revolt against European powers to have succeeded. 

Envoys from the Spanish Regional Governor eventually bore fruit and the Spanish were allowed to build a much smaller church, on 'best behavior' over a decade later. 
The Pueblo was right on the Santa Fe Trail and was for years involved in trade between Santa Fe - West and Missouri on the East. The Pueblo population declined over the century's, mostly gone by the late 1800's

We were running out of time, so Santa Rosa got short shift and then we got lost getting out of town, so that didn't help. As we got closer and closer to the Texas border the sky got darker and darker and pretty soon it was black overhead with just the faintest hint of light at the horizon in every direction. Then the clouds opened up with the most intense downpour we've ever been in. The rain was hitting so hard it actually looked like milky foam on the road. Going over 50 was crazy. Then the lightning started up and stayed to entertain us every 20-30 seconds the whole 110 miles into Amarillo.
Good thing EVs are waterproof.

There must be an absolutely awesome wind farm(s) in the area. By that time it was completely dark, but you could see the flashing red light at the top of each one, literally by the hundreds stretching off in every direction for about half of that stretch.

Just as Albuquerque had hotel prices ten bucks above the average (so far) so Amarillo has prices $10 lower. An nearly three star level Baymont for $52/night? Amazing.

Day 10 Stats: 317 miles 245 Wh/mi. (remember the rain/storm) 79 KWh.

Alas, there is a Part 4 Here.

Road tripping the $15K Tesla Pt2

 If you missed it Part One is right here.

Part 2 begins with Day 5:

Day five in which we prove that Wingin'it, the motto of this trip, does not always go perfectly.

It started in the same nothing (er, Needles CA) as the last ended. With minimal breakfast we headed out of town on Rt66 going north through ~50 miles of semi-maintained unlined 1 1/2 lane road that had some severe up and down heaves. It's good there was no breakfast or other heaves might have.

 
It's not like there was -nothing- along the way, in fact some of the plant life was quite interesting.

Sorta like Joshua Trees except different.

It started to climb into the hills and past many current or abandoned mines to the little town of tourist trap, er, no, 'The Town of Oatman' whose old style plank sidewalks and shops had attracted the mother lode of bikers. We made it through alive and untrinketed. No breakfast either.

Past many more mines and mine tailings and mobile homes and rusted junk
...and a couple of the more interesting mountain passes since Wednesday. Ups and downs and tight turns and sharp cliffs. It was fun.

We made it down off the passes to Kingman, AZ about lunchtime. Yay.
The idea for a side trip to see Lake Havasu and London Bridge was floated and accepted. 

"Do we need to charge?"
Nah, it's only 60 miles.

Yes it's a bridge, and a pretty silly one at that, out in a desert.

Turns out 'That' 60 miles is 60 miles down, from like 3000 ft. to 536 ft. and what with the EV battery fending off 103.drg.F heat all along there's not enough charge to make it back up. The screen finds up the nearest charger, in Needles. Remember Needles? Yeah me neither, It's hard to recall nothing.

But they do have the cheapest charger in hundreds of miles. Good thing the second time too. We drove in at 6% both times and filling up to 100% was $11 each time.

The very same Day's Inn took us back for another night, same amazing rate too.

Day 5 totals: 229 miles, 236 Wh/mi. 54 KWh.

Day 6:

Enough Rt66ing for a bit. Having messed up yesterday, we were supposed to stay in Kingman last night, so waking up in Needles was not part of the plan, we decided a break was in order.
Las Vegas is two hours away, and there's lodging deals to be had.
One of us had been promised a trip to New York  New York.
Turns out this was the wrong one. But, what do you expect for for $59 plus fees and parking.

We'd been to Vegas, not quite 20 years back but had never set foot in NY:NY:Vegas before. It's one of the big mess of MGM properties. 

But first a side trip to Fremont street. We hadn't seen that before either. The winds that day were gusting to 60 MPH and it wasn't a comfortable time. The scene was interesting though, you don't see people like that every day. Then the automated parking garage charged us $25 for one hour parking. Not the high point of the trip.

NY:NY: It smelled much less awful than Vegas Strip resorts in the past. The lobby and eating areas are good and we stay away from the casino areas anyway. Not being into drinking, gambling or nude showgirls, Vegas isn't exactly our thing, but the attractions and spectacle are very interesting. 

Being Cinco de Mayo, there was of course a Mariachi band. Even if only one was playing, all you could hear was the trumpets. Fortunately they took turns with the fiddlers. Dinner was good, You'd expect Mexican, but we're not that predictable, if somewhat expensive, so Steak. Mmmm, first one in months and months.

Day 6 totals: 127 miles, 236 Wh/mi. 30 KWh.

Day 7: Look before you drive mmmmmmiles...

Exiting Vegas was even easier than getting in, a bit of breakfast on the way and a trip to the White Hills Supercharger wherein the battery was topped up for $11.50. Sounds like a great rate but that's for only 50% of capacity.  We might need it as we're going to the Grand Canyon West end! Some of us have never been Grand before.

Yep, this is as close as we got. That's the Western end out there in the distance.

Or not. This is a somewhat telephoto shot of exactly how close we got. The advertising looked good, of course. But this one time we got distracted and failed to look at reviews. BIG mistake.

It seems this end of the canyon is on tribal lands and as a method of making money for the tribe they've fenced off the road and put up a big parking lot and then sell you bus tickets to see that end of the canyon. If you want tickets and a chance to actually see anything it was $71 plus tax. Yes that's $150 for two people. No freakn'way. 

We agree that the tribe should be able to do what they want with their land. We just should have checked this out more before spending most of the day driving there.  They have also put  25 or 35 MPH signs up over miles and miles of the road there. And several tribal police vehicles...

To add insult to injury the slow travel made us too late to get into the Route66 Museum in Kingman AZ. Supposedly the best of the bunch. That turns into tomorrow's thing. Jersey Mike's in Kingman had about the best chipotle chicken sandwich ever. Didn't exactly compensate for the rest of the day though.
Expedia comes through again. Remarkably nice completely refurbed Motel6 for $62. There's another Motel6 on the other end of town, $6 cheaper but Ew, stay away.

Day 7 totals:  217 miles, 221Wh/mi. 48 KWh

And, Day 7 ends our first week of the adventure.

Top line is the trip. Bottom is since we bought the car.

Yep, right about $140 in 'fuel' travel costs so far, dwarfed of course by $600 in lodging and around $400 in food.

Absent a couple things that didn't work out, Trip: Wingin'it is doing well so far.

On to Part 3!

Roadtripping The $15K Tesla, Pt.1: To Rt66

Getting to and beginning the Route 66 EV journey.   Done on the cheap of course...  ;-)     Duh.
In case you missed it: The Car's Gestation

Roadtripping The $15K Tesla -or- Eh, winging it works fine now.

Those poor hearty souls who have been wading through the mire of dense prose on this blog for years may recall the intense (at least occasionally) planning required to get anywhere with earlier, shorter range EVs. Having been at this for awhile, the Tesla being #8, we well recall the planning required to make sure you could return home if you thought to deviate from your normal path, like forgetting to pick up a child (not that such a thing would ever happen) and having to track back into town, and then crawl home, attempting to get 32 miles of range out of a 30 mile (optimistically) vehicle. Working with 30, 35, 40, 70, 109, 156 and 226 mile nominal range vehicles, you do get used to how they operate in the real world, and as long as you use experience rather than fantasy to guide you, you'll mostly be all right. In point of fact we never got stranded.

So when the 200+mi. range Leaf showed up, the options for extended travel opened up, but even then, over twenty years after starting out on this electric journey, some serious planning was required to make it to the Canadian border or the Mexican border or the other trips it could take, carefully. The earlier shorter range EVs could, with some planning, make it to the Coast or 70 miles to PDX, but it was rarely something you did on the spur of the moment.

Enter the Tesla. Basically there's so much charging infrastructure and you're so well connected to it that planning and worrying become mostly a thing of the past. The big screen in the car will tell you what chargers you might need to stop at along the way and even how long it will take to get charged up there.

Day 1

Just like the last electric roadtrip, we were late outta the gate, leaving closer to noon than one might like. Unable to decide on taking 101-S from Crescent City CA or doing the usual boring I5 all the way, we stopped at the Tesla SuperCharger (referred to hereafter as 'SC') in Grants Pass OR and took on $15 worth of electrons while figuring out where to go.

The lateness decided for us, as any reasonable destination over the hump to the coast (2 hrs.) would leave us in darkness. Hard to see the sights that way. So, I-5 rulez dude.

Not that there aren't a few sights along... Shasta for example. Pretty nice day too.

A bit south of Shasta was also our second charging stop. Took on $20 worth of electrons while we investigated a late afternoon snack and bathroom break. 25 min. is just about right for that. While snacking we investigated places to stay for the night. Expedia had recently messaged about a $20 credit. Their listing for a newly refurbished Motel6 just south of Sacramento on old 99, right behind an also refurbished Dennys. We took the chance and it turned out really nice. Owned by a family, they were pleasant, and the room was clean, quiet and better than expected. The bed was kind of firm, but some like that. For $63/night including all taxes and fees, we haven't had a Motel6 experience this nice in over 20 years. 

Day one totals 498 miles,  228wh/mi, 115Kwh over roughly 9 hours. 

If you don't care about FSD then skip down to 'Day 2' below.

This is our first real day with FSD, Tesla's mostly automatic driving software/hardware.  And it is by turns (so to speak) brilliant and quirky-bordering-on-dumb. We'll deal here with a couple of the bad and/or annoying things first:

It keeps popping up warnings or notifications, mostly in small-ish text sometimes toward the bottom of the screen. It's also quick to dismiss them, with no way we've found to bring them back. The really important stuff is bigger and toward the top driver's side of the screen and accompanied by three urgent beeps. Which is fine and appropriate but by the time you get through with whatever you're doing and focus there the urgent message has disappeared.

There's also the problem of it yelling at you like that in the middle of something you need to concentrate on, like it dropping out of FSD on the freeway because it's confused by leftover construction paintlines, as far as we could tell. You're supposed to be watching out all the time anyway, (and boy will it remind you) and so it's not really difficult to recover, but just as you need to be doing that it's beeping and flashing and distracting you to tell you that "You need to start driving now" which if you hadn't already, you'd probably be in trouble. We don't see a better way to do this and it does need to be done. As stated, maybe have the notices stay up longer, especially for newbies.
It also doesn't do well with really tight narrow curvy mountain pass kinds of roads, especially if there's eroded lines. It will do it, just rather slowly. Your grandma is quicker.

The rest of it, absent minor quibbles about when to change lanes is almost unremittingly positive. It has quickly jolted aside to prevent potentially hitting a pedestrian that stepped sideways off a curb, slowed markedly for children playing near the edge of the street, made it through complex off angle six input intersections without unnecessary pause, and paused intelligently to let other traffic by, or have more time to figure things out. It is able to thread through six lane freeway traffic, finding a 'relatively fast' lane and then working it's way back to the right as the next exit gets near. Pretty darn impressive.
We were expecting a dancing bear. It isn't usually about how well the bear dances, but rather that it can dance at all. That's not what we got though. The autopilot/FSD software has been through three fairly serious revisions in the three weeks we've had the car. One we didn't use much, one that worked well on the highway but not so well in town, and this third one 12.3.5 that does much better job in city's and will take a pretty good stab at parking. We've tried it on parallel parking and back-in parking and that was about 90% successful, but head-in parking doesn't seem to work, possibly because they want the main front cameras available when it comes time to leave the parking spot.

Day 2.

Not used to getting up early, so we didn't. Dennys isn't the world's best but they're the rare national chain that mostly does Gluten Free well. About ~96% of the time. Which doesn't sound so good, except that everyone else is worse. The 55&Over menu is reasonably priced as well which doesn't hurt any.
Looking at state of charge, we lost 4% overnight (25 down to 21%) running Sentry Mode (the video security system) -and- running the little fridge (from the Camping Tesla post)
A quick search for a Supercharger turned up one right on our route and one about a mile diagonally off route. Sounds like a no brainier until you find that the off route one has off peak rates (before 11:AM in this case) of $0.25/Kwh and the other, on I-5 is $0.49. So that nearly full charge cost $10.51 instead of $21. In this case it's worth the detour, but not always.

This brings up the art of SC (supercharger) arbitrage.

When you hit the lightning bolt symbol on the right side of the screen in the car it shows all the SCs in the area you're looking at. Hitting each one will bring up details like paid/free parking, times of operation and the number of cents/Kwh, either as a single quote, or with a time-of-day graph if peak billing is in effect. Mostly due to different electric rates from the provider. Sometimes to encourage people to make the SCs less crowded during peak travel hours. So in about 30 sec. you can not only look for charging, you can see if one has any advantages over another. Since the same screen will also show you local restaurants and/or bathrooms, the information for informed decision making is readily available.

Frankly the run down I5 through the middle of California is best done at night. In the day it's a long lotta brown nothing. The SC at Santa Nella was interesting because there's over 48(?) stalls, they have giant solar panel roof/sun-shades and MegaPack (giant storage batteries) to even out the power availability. Partially as a result the rates/Kwh are reasonable (40 cents) in the middle of nowhere where power can't be all that cheap. 

Then another long slog to Bakersfield. Not such an impressive SC, but it works, and it's a short jaunt to JackInTheBox, who also tends to do Gluten Free well.

Here, since the night's stop was planned for Ventura CA (as much as there's any planning) we happened to notice something on the fancy automatic map, 

LOTS of oil pumps. Some even work

which mentioned the existence of an alternate route through Taft and Mariposa (important oil fields back in the day)

Like all photos, click for a larger version.

and over the ridges directly to the coast on a tiny two lane, and sometimes one lane, road. This avoids the whole Grapevine/Tejon Pass mess in favor of roads built for the semi-sports car that is the Model 3. Certain passengers may not have appreciated the curvy diving up and down narrow road, but the driver had a blast. Almost no traffic, which was a good thing given the five single lane sections due to half the road being missing due to rock-falls or winter washouts.

Looking back on whence we came

We were going to get a nice shot of the sunset as the road headed into Ventura, but food was calling and we found no viable vantage points. The motel was a nice little reworked '50's two-row single story 'motor lodge' that has been redone with very modern interior and fixtures. It seems to have been bought by a nice family from India. We got to meet three of them and the daughter is off at UC Davis. They made the rooms slightly smaller due to much needed soundproofing and now the spiffy interior doesn't match the exterior, but in a good way. They were running a special through Hotels.com. $80,
 ...and certainly nicer than the $20 difference compared with last night.

Day2 stats. 458 miles at 232wh/mi. 106 Kwh over roughly 10 hours.

Day 3.

Up at the crack of ... well hey, we made it out the door by 8:30. Foggy and 55 deg. Went up the coast a bit to breakfast in Santa Barbara. Never been there before, so why not?
Morning rush seemed to be headed mostly the opposite way.  Glad FSD is comfortable with the high speed four lanes of rather competitive feeling 80 MPH traffic, because that's certainly not our comfort zone. Cooler temps and 80+ MPH eats batteries for breakfast. That short leg was nearly 280wh/mi. worst on the trip so far. We made sure to make it over to the SC before 11:AM so as to catch the non-peak rate: 37 cents vs. 52 cents. ($15 vs, $22). Only point of interest was that the charging stall next to us had been vandalized by having something sticky (gum?) stuck in the connector. You have to watch for that kind of thing. Probably people protesting Musk by inconveniencing everyone who is not him.

The day's plan was to hit the Venice beach pier in Santa Monica,  the nominal western terminus of route 66 and see how far we got following the route back east. Turns out: Not Very Far.

Nobody we know.  Looking East, beginning Rt66 at last.

Having forgotten just how bad LA traffic frequently is, any plan that might have been made was overwhelmingly optimistic. The thirty or so miles from Santa Barbara to Santa Monica took about three hours. Going from the pier to the old section of 66 near Glendale took over four hours. With some stops along the way (Venice Beach Boardwalk?) it was a full day, and we only actually made it around 100 miles. Once that became obvious we found a deal from the Wyndam hotels site that gave another big discount if you sign up for their rewards program. A nice room at a remodeled HoJo's turned up in Pasadena for $80. Not actually as nice as the previous night, if somewhat bigger.

The odd quirk was that when the navigation system in the car was asked to find it's way there, it, to avoid traffic, routed us up through old West Hollywood and curved around the hill with the Griffith Park Observatory on it and dropped us down via Mullholland Drive past the Griffith Park Zoo and Train exhibit. Alas, we were too tired to partake. Still quite the tour, bet there were star's homes on that route. 

Day 3 totals: 122 miles, 209wh/mi, 28Kwh (a lot of it AC) over 8+ hours.

Day 4:  Getting out of LA. Yay!

Basically Pasadena through Fontana (SC) and out to Barstow following the old Rt66 roads. Some labeled as such, some not. A clever book has turn by turn instructions going both ways.

Atlantic Richfield station, built 1915 before Rt66 even existed. Cool little Museum.

Rt66 is known as 'National Trails Highway" for about 200 miles in California from Barstow to Needles. Most of this is just flatlands with mostly straight somewhat bumpy two-lane running through it. On one pass the old road doesn't exist any more and you detour onto I-15 for 15 miles.
The only bit of excitement was a section 50 miles or so from Needles where the road is washed out and they haven't gotten around to repairing it. The higher rate of power usage due to having to use the freeway for that section, plus having to drive back aways resulted in the lowest state of charge on the car recorded this trip so far. 6%. It did get us into Needles no problem by driving 70 MPH instead of 75. 

Needles isn't much and the Museum was closed. Got a pretty good deal on a Day's Inn. $69 and to top it off the Superchargers here have the lowest cost we've seen ever. 20 cents per KWh. That's basically 220-230 miles of travel for $10. Not bad, that's like 4.5 cents/mile.

Day 4 totals 292 miles, 198 wh/mi, 59Kwh (again a lot of it AC, 98 deg.F) over 8+ hours.

The saga continues with Part II

Delicate power Trunk, especially for a rental

One of the things noticed during the run-up to purchasing the $15K Ex-Hertz Tesla was that the power trunk worked poorly if at all. You could usually get to open by helping it along as it struggled mightily, and closing was no problem, just hit the button and jump out of the way as it slammed shut.

The general consensus was that having a not-so-robust, nor obvious, power trunklid on a "Hundreds of Newbies" rental vehicle was probably not the best idea. Hertz thought so too as they had (as we later figured out) replaced the power lift strut at least once. 

Basically when someone who has no Tesla knowledge wants to open the trunk they find the right button and pull up, helping it along as needed.
When it comes time to close the lid some will find the button, others will not and will just pull down and slam it shut. As you're probably aware the single sided Tesla power strut DOES NOT like this at all.
Over time it will warp the lid and bend the hinges and make the strut very cranky.

Since we knew about this already we looked into options. One was to have Tesla do it. That seemed to quote around $300 including labor and scheduled out a couple weeks, when we were planning to be road-tripping.
The second option was to just swap the power strut for a 'normal' non-powered unit. About $15-20.  In looking at that option the semi-automatic strut kit from EVANNEX (about $30 with a coupon code) came up. In theory this would provide auto-open and manual close. We ordered one of these kits the same day we picked up the car. About a week later it arrived. Considerable Youtube viewing in the interim.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night! when the trunk failed for good. Darn, and it was working so well too. Trying to get it to open would move the lid sideways and push on the glass. Bad idea. So, we're loading up from the rear seat area instead, while getting very very wet.
The next day the trunk struts moved to the top of the to-do list.

The failures, in repose.

Getting the trunk open enough to pop the strut loose was a chore. One person using a piece of wood to push the strut sideways (to keep it from breaking the glass) while the other jiggled it upward over 10-15 min.
Yay, at last it's open.
Youtube taught us how to pop the strut ends loose. There were also videos about popping some interior trim (one push-pin that's hard to see and a couple clips) loose enough to get at the power strut connector. Once that's loose you just wiggle the wires/rubber grommet out.

In the mean-time you've propped the lid, or, are having a very bad day.

Gorilla Tape Rulez!

Once we popped on the new struts and at least temporarily patched the hole we found that all the bending had caused the lid to be so seriously misaligned that you couldn't close it without seriously endangering the rear glass. And with the trunk held open it of course started to rain again.

There were two issues with the trunk alignment. One is that the entire trunk lid was twisted so one side was about 2-3" (7cm) higher, and the other was that the whole thing was pushed over sideways about 1/2 inch (8-10mm).

In looking at the hinges, and some online material, it looked like the lid bends were beyond the limit of the little adjustments possible with bolts and adjustment holes.

So we put on gloves and grabbed the open trunklid from the side, fingers on the top hinge plate, and tugged it sideways, about a dozen times until the panel gap was close to lining up. Then grabbed the whole lid from both sides and twisted it until it was closing almost evenly. This is probably not the recommended professional approach. ...at your own risk!
However, it worked. We got close enough to let the 'regular' adjustments do the rest of the work.

This is the bottom left hinge plate. That round blank thing is a stud that goes through the body and there's a 13mm nut on the other side. Since you had to pull the interior trim loose enough to unsnap the power strut wiring connector, you've left yourself just enough room to get a wrench in there. Do be aware that you're working right next to where the HV wiring comes into the car. Yes there's a cover, but have a care.
The red line points at the fact that we moved the plate about 1/8th inch (2-3mm) sideways. Don't forget to re-torque the nut.

Here is the attachment/adjustment plate on one side of the trunk lid. You can see how much we had to move the lid relative to the hinge assembly (the lighter areas called out by the red lines) to get the trunk panel gaps all aligned properly. We had to remove the strut to get this adjustment right.

End notes: It was obvious while in there that someone with even less clue/care than us had been in working on it before. None of that section of the interior was put back together correctly.

We still don't have the hinges quite right, or maybe it just needs lube. The lid won't open completely on it's own like it's supposed to. Not EVANNEX's fault. Regardless it's working well enough for now.