TeslaRiders, Adventure Blog

Below is a chart of the data.

We made it with minimal arguing, no major crises and a bunch of laughter. It was all good. Overall, we made two (maybe 3) extra stops to charge as compared to what we would have done with our Subaru (yes, how stereotypical of us). A few times we took extra time to charge, but it made us be more leisurely about our travel. Overall, I’d estimate that we spent an extra

2 to 2.5 hours. With the Black Dread in tow, we needed some time to get out of the car. I’ll be honest it also made us be much more patient in our travels. We took our time and enjoyed the experience.

As for cost at the pump, it was much cheaper to use the electron pump than the gas. We were keeping track of costs and it should of cost just about $55 for all the Supercharging. We also just checked our history and found we were only charged for a couple of the stops. No idea why. We so far have been charged for $23.57. A couple of places we waited, one or two were full so the charge might have been slower, but I really have no idea why.

The Supercharger is located in the Brandon Town Center shopping plaza. The chargers are a short walk from Starbucks and a Corner Bakery. My girls hit Starbucks for use of the facilities. I walked the Black Dread. At 8:20 am the parking lot was empty and we were the only ones at the chargers. Eventually one other Tesla showed up. The Wife and Child returned and took over the Black Dread duty. I went in to Starbucks and was waiting in line for the restroom. Next thing I know this woman starts chatting to me. I clearly was trying to just wait but she kept talking. I wasn’t making eye contact, was pretending to study the menu and had an astonished “why are you talking to me look.” After a few minutes of her chatting, I asked her if there was really someone in the restroom to which she said yes. As a few more minutes went by and she continued to prattle on, at this point beginning to repeat herself, I finally determined I needed to escape and let’s be real, if someone was in the bathroom that long I sure as hell wasn’t going to want to go in. I politely exited this one-sided conversation and ran over to the Corner Bakery which had 2 empty stalls, was cleaner and lacked a crazy woman. It’s the little things…

We decided to charge extra so we wouldn’t have to charge immediately in Naples. It probably added 10 extra minutes to the stop, if that. As we stopped charging I pushed the button on the charger while the Wife pushed “stop charging” on the console. This, we think, caused the charger to get locked in the car. Seriously…? We were so close to our final destination. No matter what we tried it was still locked in. We Googled the situation (gotta love the Google!) and located the manual release pull cord in the trunk. A quick tug and the charger released. Victory! We were ready to go so off we went. As we tried to leave the parking lot the Wife got in the wrong lane. She drew upon her Northeast driving skills and after an illegal U-turn corrected the matter. We looped back around and we were truly off (in more ways than one...). Child was riding shot gun, the Black Dread and I hanging in the back. We left with 252 miles of charge.

The rest of the trip was thankfully uneventful with the exception of some Christmas music and emissions testing. We arrived in Naples after traveling 153 miles on 193 miles of charge.

Here’s a happy Black Dread.

At 5:45 AM my internal clock woke me and we starting moving. We are really an efficient team when we want to be. We were out of there by 6:36 am, ordered Starbucks and quickly hit the road. The Black Dread was very excited. I was in the back seat. After two days of essentially sleeping all the time, Child had woken up and wanted to be in the front to see things. Wife wanted to drive, so I was good with hanging in back (yes, I fit in back). We left with a charge of 306 miles and a plan to stop in Brandon, FL for a final charge before our last leg.

At this point we clearly just wanted to get to Naples, but I must say that I never thought that I would be so focused that I would miss a major landmark. Apparently, we drove right by Daytona Speedway and completely missed it. Doh!

The drive this morning was amazing. There were very few cars on the road. It was still dark and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The temperature was in the 40’s. We were able to see Venus, Jupiter and Mercury lined up in the sky as the Sun was rising. We cruised through Orlando and past all of the parks with only a few other cars on the road with us (we were giddy about the lack of traffic, or at least the Wife was since she was driving). We saw the hot air balloons floating over area which was very cool. 

We arrived at the Hampton Inn Daytona/Ormand Beach having traveled 127 miles since our charge in Kingsland. I believe we used 149 miles of charge (accurate documentation of mileage was a low priority at this point as we were keeling over from exhaustion) resulting in about 1.17 charge miles used per road miles.

We plugged in to the destination charger. There was only 1 and even though we were there late it was open (winning!). I walked the Black Dread while the Child and Wife brought stuff up to the room. There was very little grass and while it was tempting to walk her near the culvert, I refrained. Gator wrestling was not at the top of my list of things to do right then, plus I was trying to keep the Black Dread quiet. As we headed to our room I mentioned how it would have been nice to walk the Black Dread there. Wife quickly commented that the employee at the desk warned her not to walk the dog near water. Glad I had my wits about me.

Now this is only the second time the Black Dread has been in a hotel and this time we are on the second floor. This is also a much nicer hotel than the Hyatt Place we stayed at in VA. The Black Dread was very good. She navigated the elevator (couldn’t find the stairs, sigh). She didn’t panic when a guy popped out of his room. In fact, she didn’t even bark. In retrospect, I think she was sandwiched between the Wife and I so tightly she didn’t have a chance to bark. We ended up getting her in the room with only minor, under-her-breath woofs and chuffs. Good dog! Now if we back up a few moments, the Child had gone ahead up to the room ahead of us and when we tried to open the door we couldn’t because she put the deadbolt on. While I appreciate her view on safety, we were not keen on standing in the hallway with a reactive dog. Needless to say, some muttered curses were uttered as we waited for her to open the door.

Before we could get to Florida, we needed to stop at one more charger. We stopped in Kingsland, GA. To get there we traveled 102 miles and used 134 miles of charge. I was driving and we were averaging around 75 mph, and at times faster, just to keep up with the flow of traffic. This resulted in us using 1.31 miles of charge for each mile traveled.

The Kingsland Supercharger was a hopping.  We arrived at 8:29 pm and ended up being the second car in line. The other guy had been there for 10 minutes. I’m guessing a few of the cars there were going to have idling charges, but whatever. The guy ahead of us in line ended up leaving and about 5 minutes later a charger opened up. Woohoo! I’m estimating we waited for 10 minutes and charged for ~45 minutes. While we were there other Teslas kept coming in and there was never an open stall. Tesla needs more Superchargers in the GA I-95 corridor. More options would be nice. Supercharger EXPANSION!?!?

The Superchargers in Savannah are located in the airport garage. When we arrived 5 out of the 6 were occupied. We took the open one, but it started charging us at 4 kW which was NOT going to fly. In about 5 minutes, during which time the Black Dread was barking and whining, another Tesla pulled out. The Black Dread and I held the spot while the Wife moved Ruby over. It started charging at 26 kW and continued to increase. Phew! Wife stayed with Black Dread and Ruby while Child and I went into the airport to see what foodstuffs were available. We found Starbucks and an ice cream place to get coffee and snacks. I was really looking for a Dr. Pepper since that will keep me awake for hours. No such luck. Wife and Child got ice cream. I went with a caffeinated Frappuccino. We got back to the car, checked the traffic and left with 211 miles of charge at 6:40 pm. As a FYI, we did have to pay to exit the garage. It was a big $1.

It’s at this point that the poo-poo hit the fan (nothing to do with Emissions Testing Mode or the burritos we just ate, thankfully). We had been watching the traffic as we ate and it was getting ugly out there. The main problem I quickly realized, was that there aren’t many other roads running South in SC. The other problem is I-95 is only two lanes. The Tesla nav and even Waze were still insisting we stay on I-95, but I had decided another plan was in order. Now that I was in the co-pilot seat I was not going to allow us to get stuck, so I started mapping out a route.

As we approached the problem spot on I-95 with only a 55-minute delay, Waze finally redirected us to the route I had just planned. This took us into the backroads of SC. We should have only been on here for ~20 minutes, but another incident showed up and resulted in our creative route through SC. This TOTALLY SCREWED our timeline. It did give us an amazing perspective on the extremes of wealth and poverty in this country. (This can be a blog in itself) We did our best to make sure the Child stayed awake for this part of the drive. We drove by a small cemetery with both US and Confederate flags flying. The history nerd in me wanted to see who was buried there, but it was on private land and we had to keep moving. We had a hunter walk across the road in front of us, which took us a bit by surprise. Eventually we went by Parris Island and then Hilton Head area. The natural landscape is spectacular especially with the Sun setting. We arrived at the Savannah Airport at 6 pm to use the Superchargers.

I’m estimating that in this leg we traveled about 210 miles, taking WAY too long, using 234 miles of charge. The Wife used cruise and when possible autopilot. Our speed was typically below 60 and there was some opportunity for the regenerative braking to add to the battery, but not as much as you’d think. In this leg of the trip, Ruby used 1.11 miles of charge per mile of road traveled.

Here are a few of the sites along this “detour”.

First, middle of somewhere SC.

Parris Island Area

Sunset in SC

The Wife and Child came back, allowing me to throw out the garbage, run over to IHOP, and use the facilities. We then sat in the car and ate our lunch in peace and quiet amidst the chaos of the parking lot while we charged. It was during this time, as The Wife was tweeting about Superchargers being occupied by gas guzzlers, that she ran across a hilarious tweet about someone using Emissions Testing Mode in their Tesla to make loud farting noises as he used the turn signal. We then recalled that we had updated the software in the Tesla the night before we left for our trip and hadn’t played with this mode in the car yet. The Wife engaged Emissions Testing Mode and moved the whoopie cushion on the screen from seat to seat to make a series of farting noises from the speaker nearest to each seat. This, of course, provided great entertainment for our inner 7-year olds, but it elicited squeals of laughter when we played fart sounds from the speaker near the seat where Black Dread was sitting. Dogs being dogs, when someone farts The Black Dread will jog over to sniff around, even sniffing her own butt when she farts, LOL. So, when she heard the noises she perked up and started sniffing the air, but was a bit confused when she realized this wasn’t coming from any of her humans and there was no scent to catch. After some investigation during which time her humans continued to play various fart noises while dissolving into hysterical laughter at Black Dread’s antics, she finally had enough and crawled into The Child’s lap to seek refuge. After we pulled ourselves together, The Wife took over from me and we pulled out with a charge of 291 miles at 2:09 pm, Black Dread still sitting on Child’s lap.

Traffic was a mess on I-95, even the cheesy South of the Border signs didn’t help. We didn’t stop. As for the traffic, there were two accidents in one area, but all the other instances we came to complete stops for unknown reasons. Very frustrating! We easily lost 1 hour, if not more. Grrr. We finally arrived at 1:01 pm to the Superchargers in Florence, SC which are at Magnolia Mall. We had traveled 180 miles on 215 miles of charge, therefore using 1.19 miles of charge per mile of road.

Our first stop was Rocky Mount, NC (116 miles) since we wanted to add charge so we can go directly to Florence SC. The Superchargers in Rocky Mount are near several hotels, a restaurant and aren’t far off I-95. There were 8 Tesla Superchargers and 2 generic ones. There was 1 other car charging briefly, but it was early. We rolled in with 105 miles of charge remaining. Everyone, including the Black Dread, needed to use the “facilities.” We used the restrooms in the lobby of the DoubleTree hotel. In our drive we went 116 road miles and used 144 charge miles, resulting in 1.24 miles of charge per road traveled. Temperatures were in the 40’s and rose to mid 50’s by the time we reached Rocky Mount. There was also a 12 mph wind from the West. These may have had some impact on the usage.

In Maryland we decided to do a driver switch. I took over and decided that no autopilot or cruise control would be used. I wanted to get a base read on my driving efficiency. I should also comment that I tend to be the heavier foot in the family. We left Laurel with 254 miles of charge. In Virginia, the nav got me sucked into some weird express HOV lane that I really didn’t need to be in, especially since they charged for it. I guess I’ll have to forgo a Starbucks later this week. This drive seemed really long. We did hit a few slowdowns just due to the number of vehicles and arrived at the Hyatt Place in Chester, VA with 74 miles of battery at 11:50ish. We traveled 154 miles, resulting in 1.17 battery miles for every 1 mile driven.

The Hyatt Place had 2 Tesla destination chargers. They were both empty. We plugged Ruby in, the Wife checked us in, and I walked the Black Dread. We were given a room on the first floor near a door that went directly outside. The Black Dread has never been in a hotel before so needless to say she did not fully understand. She barked in very brief spurts. She ignored her food and only drank water. We hopped into bed and tried to get some sleep. We then had noisy neighbors who, with every bang, loud laugh and closing door incited a machine gun burst of barking. We quickly taught the Black Dread that this wasn’t appropriate, so she switched to growling, chuffing and fidgeting on our bed. At some point I passed out and woke up at 5 am to get the family moving.

We decided to forgo the recommended Tesla nav stop at National Harbor in MD. Why? Well it is in National Harbor which is a huge complex that we don’t feel like dealing with and we have enough charge to get to Laurel, MD. It is unfortunately a little bit off the highway, but will give us the opportunity to move around. Wife (who supposedly doesn’t have range anxiety) was beginning to stress. We have 90 miles of charge left and the charger is 20 miles away. I couldn’t figure out why she was slowly starting to freak. She wasn’t really saying anything, but started asking about other chargers. While we were talking I said we have 92 miles of charge and only 20 miles to go and that we will be fine. It was at that point that she looked at the display and realized she was reading our distance to destination as how much battery we would have left. Doh! Considering that is a number which is dropping quickly (since we will soon arrive), she was slowly panicking that I’d have to push Ruby into the Supercharger. SMH! LOL!

Black Dread update – once she figured out we had not reached our final destination and just a pitstop, she decided she wanted to get back into the car. I forced her to walk around. She barked at all the dogs and one sketchy guy (good dog).

Child update – Moved from the car and removed the tissue first. Now engrossed in social media and who is dying their hair what color. Ah, to be a kid again. Major worries of life.

Wife update – She is still driving and since the traffic is waning she is now trying out Ruby’s autopilot. She really likes that it keeps her a specific distance from the car in front of her, in the middle of the lane and if she is not going her desired speed it will identify the lane which will allow her to travel at that speed. She can then select to move over by using her turn signal. Once she does that, the car changes lanes. The one thing you need to be aware of is that when the lanes are wide due to on ramps, off ramps, toll booths or merging, the car will try to put you in the middle. It does this even if the lane will be ending. It can’t see that far. You still need to pay attention and adjust the steering. I personally wouldn’t use it unless I was going to be in the middle lane for a while.

The weather is improving. No rain, but windy 10 mph from the South. Got to love headwinds, NOT.

First stop Molly Pitcher Service Area. We stopped with a charge of 102 miles remaining of battery. Yes, we could have gone further, but I really had to stop (if you know what I mean). We traveled 190 miles from home on 204 miles of charge. This results in us using 1.07 miles of charge per every road mile. Considering the weather and wind, I think that is pretty awesome. The regenerative braking in the traffic helped balance the wind, temperature and load effects on the battery use.

The chargers are in the back corner well away from the chaos of the service area. There are 4 stalls and 2 chargers for Nissan Leafs (or is it Leaves if there is more than one? Whatever.) When we arrived 3 out of the 4 stalls were in use. Soon after we arrived, another Tesla drove by and another parked. [Elon/Tesla – you may want a few more stalls here]I stayed with the car and the Black Dread (who was in full meltdown when we stopped) while Wife and Child went to the restroom and Starbucks. Once they came back I headed into the restroom, picked up a sandwich at Starbucks and by that point we were close to 80% as I got an alert on my phone. We arrived at 5:11 and were on the highway by 6:02 and ended up leaving with 271 miles of charge. It cost us a big $7.80. For that price I would have gotten maybe 3 gallons of gas. To put it in a different perspective, my sandwich at Starbucks was $6.40.

I didn’t get a chance to snap a pic, but as we drove by the gas pumps the lines were at least 5 cars long, if not more. Also, the pumps were in a position that I could not have pumped the gas and then easily gone back inside if I wanted to. So, the answer to whether we could have done the stop quicker if driving a gas vehicle is no, not with the lines at the pumps and the lines inside. If we didn’t have the Black Dread we may have been able to be slightly quicker in a gas vehicle, but let’s be real after close to 4 hours in a car, you need to walk around.

75 miles into our trip and we are extremely pleased with how Ruby is performing. The Wife is driving and has been using the cruise control set below 70. We’ve been hitting a lot of traffic and the visibility is very poor. At times it has been difficult for us to see, but the sensors have been able to detect everything around us. In fact, Ruby has done a spectacular job of maintaining safe distances, slowing rapidly in response to traffic and the nav has been great at re-routing us as the traffic situations change. At this point we have used 100 miles of battery life. Considering the conditions and wind, this puts us at 1 mile of road to 1.3 miles of battery.

As for the passengers, the Black Dread is still sitting up and refuses to sleep. Child is completely out, and has a tissue stuck up her nose to prevent dripping or at least that’s what I think. It is very possible that she was blowing her nose and passed out. The Wife has cursed out several individuals who apparently think we are in the Grand Prix. I’m sitting here playing with numbers. Life is good, except for the traffic. Happy Friday before the holidays.

So, our adventure began with 306 miles of charge and Ruby reasonably loaded with 2 suitcases, 3 backpacks, a dog crate being the big items. We should have been able to leave at 12:45, however the Black Dread was overly excited. While that helped to get her do pee and poo, it did not expedite her harness getting put on. She was so off the wall that we pulled out a brand spanking new Thundershirt. After 10 minutes of wrestling, chasing and cursing on my part. The Black Dread was now in the Thundershirt. No offense to the product but I’m not sure it did a damn thing except get her to roll around the floor making it thoroughly impossible to get her harness on. Sigh.