It's not as ambitious as our around the world trip from last year, but this summer we are driving across the United States to my cottage on Lake Huron in Ontario. We're taking the Tesla, which is very comfortable and easy to drive, but it means we have to take a route where we can charge easily.
For the first leg we decided to take it easy and only go from Walnut Creek to Lake Tahoe. We got started fairly late, but since it is Sunday the traffic towards Tahoe is light while the traffic coming back is heavy. Once we got past Sacramento, we stopped at the Roseville supercharger for a bathroom break, although we didn't really need to charge yet, we needed the bathroom break, so we charged up while we were there.
If you're not familiar with Teslas, there is a network of supercharging stations which Tesla owners can use for free (technically you paid for it in the price of the car), and they charge up to 10 times faster than a normal high power plug, meaning it can recharge the car in less than an hour. Normally the superchargers are placed near some restaurants, shops, etc. so you have something to do while it is charging.
Anyway the Roseville supercharger is in the parking lot of a giant mall. We went inside to use the restrooms. Yanmei found a Panda Express in the food court so we decided to have that for lunch :).
After that we continued on towards Tahoe, up and over the Donner pass to the Truckee supercharger. Going up mountains uses a lot more juice than driving on flat ground, and I believe the peak elevation we made it to was 7227 feet above sea level. One nice thing about the Tesla is it doesn't lose horsepower at altitude like a gas engine does.
Truckee is just a bit north of Lake Tahoe, so after charging up a bit we headed south towards our destination for the day. We'd booked a room at a hotel in South Lake Tahoe, so we got a scenic drive along the lake shore.
We stopped a couple of times for pictures. The lake was an incredible shade of blue. Yanmei kept exclaiming “It looks fake!”
Finally we crossed into Nevada!
Then we crossed back into California in South Lake Tahoe, by a few feet at least. Our hotel is on the California side of the street, if we walk across the street it is Nevada and there is a Harrah's hotel and casino there.
That's it for today. Tomorrow our goal is more ambitious, we want to get all the way to Salt Lake City, Utah.
-David
Honey, let's rock
Today, we finally started our road trip to East Canada after several days' discussion. Originally, I refused to start our trip this early as I still have some jet lag from my previous trip to China. However, David has stayed at home alone for 2 weeks and he can not wait to see his family there. I am glad we both made compromise and we decided to leave today. Sometimes, not for the first time, I feel we are really a good couple who are good at dealing differences and making compromise.
Sorry, I got lost
At lunch time, we arrived to a Tesla supercharger. It takes about one hour to recharge Tesla to full, so we walked into a shopping mall and tried to find a restroom and the food court to have lunch. The mall is very nice but crowded, even hard to hear clearly from David. He suddenly told me to separate and he wanted to buy “pencil”. I did not ask what it is, just agreed, then I went to find a restroom.
After a couple of minutes, I realized the sign was wrong but I found the bathroom after asking a couple of people.As David follows signs and never others, I need to tell him about it. I called him but he did not pick up the phone. Anyway, I went to bathroom and found Panda Express. I was worried about David. He suddenly called me but I could not hear him at all as it is noisy there. Finally after separating 20 minutes, we met again and he he told me he was lost and he walked the bathroom far far away to the food court, where there was another bathroom.
“We should not separate in a noisy mall we both not familiar with”, I realized,”Where did you go?”, “I went to buy a pretzel” he said…
I found David was a little bit frustrated and I told him getting lost made him feel bad emotionally but actually good for him physically, it might be helpful for his goal of walking 10,000 steps everyday:)
We finally made it to Lake Tahoe. Tomorrow I will drive more.
-Yanmei
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