Trip to Wisconsin

[+SpiceWare]

We headed over to Green Bay yesterday to visit my aunt and uncle. Spent the afternoon at Bay Beach, a municipal owned amusement park. Tickets are $0.25, the rides we went on used 2-3 tickets. The kiddie rides are all 1 ticket. The Zippin Pippin, reportedly Elvis Presley's favorite roller coaster, takes 4 tickets but was closed for some reason so we didn't get to ride it. 

 

We had enough charge to make it there and back, but stopped at the Supercharger in Howard to pick up some drinks and  show the twins how they worked. I think we gained 36 miles of range for $1.62 during our brief excursion into Meijer to grab the drinks for the ride home.  I forgot to take a photo. 

 

On our way

 

Visiting aunt Malinda and uncle Dale

 

 

 

 

At Bay Beach

 

 

 

 

 

 

The twins are all tuckered out

 

 

 

[PeteE]

On 7/30/2019 at 3:27 PM, Albert said:

I've only Supercharged at three different Superchargers in Texas (haven't gone on any long road trips yet, but that will change in October) and haven't yet been charged..

Check the loot box in your Tesla App, it shows how many free supercharger miles you have left.  I've supercharged my model 3 twice for $0.00, after using a 1000 mile referral when I purchased the car.

 

Spiceware, thanks for posting photos from your trip, looks like you guys are having fun.

[+SpiceWare]

My drive home should cost less - my first referral was delivered yesterday.

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

Stopped in Madison for lunch at Portillo's, a Chicago style hot dog place recommended by my brother. Food was good, the malts were just so-so.

 

Only 3 stalls, making it the smallest Supercharger site I've visited with Talith, but none are shared. Car was ready to go before we were done eating.

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

Second stop of the day was in Normal, Illinois.  Supercharger was quite a ways off the interstate, located in a parking garage with 1 hour free parking. Numerous food options nearby somewhat make up for the detour. Had lunch at Sichuan Chinese Restaurant, food was quite good.  As usual, car was ready to go before we were done eating.  

 

 

 

We're staying the night in Mount Vernon, Illinois in a Comfort Suites with 2 Tesla and 2 J1772 chargers. 

[+SpiceWare]

First stop of the day in Miner, Missouri. Need to get a full charge so we can bridge the gap to Little Rock. 

 

Ruby Tuesday wasn't yet open, so we had a late breakfast at McDonalds.  Service sucked, took 25 minutes to get our food.  We've had the same problem at this McDonalds in the past, so will eat at the Burger King just past it if we're there again when Ruby Tuesday's is closed. There was a slight benefit to the crappy service though, only had to wait 5 more minutes for Talith to fully charge when we got back to the car.

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

Had warning to stay below 70 when we left, with estimated 5% remaining at Little Rock

 

 

Followed a slow truck doing 66 for a half hour, during which time the limit crept up to 75 mph

 

 

Once we got a decent buffer the message went away, so I increased the speed and kept it 75 +/- for the rest of the segment, except for whenever I had to go slower due to traffic (which was apparently quite often, see reply 37). 

 

Arrived with 15% remaining, having used 217 Wh/mi

 

 

that's the lowest I've ever seen in Talith. Average for the trip so far is 243, lifetime average is 254

 

 

 

 

 

Arkansas was having a Sales Tax Holiday, which packed the mall with the Superchargers.  The chargers are not close to the stores, yet all 10 stalls were full - and only one Tesla was charging, the other 9 stalls were ICEd.  Guy showed up 3 minutes later - was in a "30 minutes general parking" slot, so I didn't say anything. 

 

 

 

 

[Albert]

That's total crap with the ICEd chargers.  Tesla needs to get more aggressive about making these electric-only parking spots, as opposed to shared-use spots.  I mean, really, who is going to come back in 30 minutes to move their car?  Nobody, they are going to stay in the restaurant or mall or whatever for as long as they need to and come back when they are done.  Which is pretty lame, as if you have a Tesla and you're using one of these spots, thanks to idle fees you bet your ass most owners are going to move their car once charging has finished!

 

And this is just going to get worse as there are more and more Teslas on the road.  

 

I'm curious to see what kind of Wh/mile I get in my P3D.  It's going to be a fair bit worse thanks to the larger and stickier tires.  And my lead foot.  Plus I have the Tesla roof rack installed (with two bike trays), although I'll likely remove that for the trip just to be safe.  The roof rack alone is a negligible hit on range, and maybe slightly less negligible with the two bike trays.  A huge hit, though, once you put one or two bikes on the roof!  I may be taking my mountain bike to Portland and back, but I'll probably take one of the wheels off, pedals, and handlebars and shove it in a bag that I can put behind the front seats.  The main reason I might keep the rack on for the trip is so I can use it to transport the...assembled bike to/from trailheads when I'm out riding it on the way back from Portland.  

 

 ..Al

[+SpiceWare]

I'd never seen it that bad before. When we got back to the car 2 stalls were empty, and other spaces around the parking lot were empty, so hopefully nobody else had to wait. Was then stuck in a huge line of cars leaving, so it took awhile to get back on the interstate. Possibly one of the sales was for a limited time range, not sure what else would explain the mass exodus of the mall at 4pm.

 

On this part of the route home the only hotel with destination charging is in Marshall, Texas.  They only had rooms with 1 bed, so I opted to stay near the Supercharger in Texarkana instead. We checked in and Ben announced he needed to do laundry ? I'd asked both if they needed anything washed before we left my brothers. So we located the guest laundry room, then I got some laundry soap and quarters from the front desk. Once he was done we went to have dinner at Olive Garden and charge Talith. Car was more than ready when we got back to it, so much so that I had to drive around about 10 minutes to bring the charge down to 90% as it's not good to leave it sitting overnight above that.

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

Last charging stop of the trip in Nacogdoches. Home's less than 3 hours from here. 

 

[+SpiceWare]

Home!

 

 

Total charging expense was $57.21 for the trip.

 

On August 1st my first referral kicked in and covered 625 miles worth of charging.

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

Taking a look at Reply #32:

 

Left Miner, MO at 11:02 with a full charge.  Arrived in Little Rock at 3:16 with 15% remaining and 270.6 miles travelled.

 

We stopped about 10 minutes at a rest stop, so average speed works out to 66 mph (270.6 / 4.1) and a full charge should go 318 miles at that speed (270.6 / .85).

 

Average speed was a bit lower than I expected since I allowed myself to do 75 +/- after the first half hour, however I40 had a lot of semis causing numerous bottlenecks along the way.  

 

With that I can estimate average distance per full charge based on how I usually drive.  For the trip that works out to 284 miles (318 * 217 / 243) and the lifetime average is 272 miles (318 * 217 / 254).

 

[+SpiceWare]

I fleshed out some of the above replies this morning.

 

This was waiting for me in the mail from Jaguar:

 

 

So I decided to do a trip comparison to Chippewa Falls with A Better Route Planner: 

 

Model 3 LR RWD

• $41 to charge^*
• 2:22 charge time
• 20:57 drive time
• 23:19 total time

Jaguar I-Pace

• $260 to charge
• 6:42 charge time
• 24:57 drive time
• 31:40 total time

 

 

 

 

^* My actual was $49.99, most likely because the car was typically waiting for us to finish eating which meant trickle charging towards 100% with per-minute billing due to state laws.  Only Albert Lea, MN billed for the electricity by kWh, which is how it should be - could you image the outrage if gas stations billed people by the minute?

[+SpiceWare]

5 hours ago, SpiceWare said:

^* My actual was $49.99

 

After taking a second look, A Better Route Planner only plans charging stops to get to the destination, so I should exclude the full-charge I did when I arrived. That puts my actual at $40.47, which makes ABRP's estimate extremely close to actual.

[+SpiceWare]

The wedding was July 27th at 4:30, so we found a place for lunch then checked out Ray's Beach.

 

 

 

 

The wedding was held at Cabin Ridge Rides. A horse drawn wagon took us to the site for the wedding.

 

 

 

 

 

We checked out the area

 

 

 

 

This mushroom/fungus was about the size of a dinner plate

 

 

Then made our way to the lodge for the reception.

 

 

 

 

 

My cousin Trillium and her dad, my uncle Jim.

 

 

 

The wedding was small, so they decided to do something unique for the guest book

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

This is cool

 

[+SpiceWare]

On the day we visited uncle Bill (Reply 24) I noticed a red circled ! so tapped it.  This popped up:

 

 

 

I also noticed the dashcam was disabled.  At first I thought it might be because the flash drive was getting close to full, but didn't have any way to check it at my brothers.  Now that I finally got around to pulling it out of the car I can see it has plenty of space:

 

 

Then I got to thinking it must be a new message Tesla added to help figure out why the dashcam footage is sometimes messed up.

 

I have the Jeda USB Hub on order, it has a compartment to hold an SSD USB drive while keeping the center console tidy. After extensive testing Jeda recommends the Samsung T5, so I ordered a 1TB version as I've heard/seen (don't recall where) that in a future update the car will be able to use external storage for downloadable content such as games.

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

My folks met up with my brother-in-law in Victoria this afternoon to get Zander and Ben home.  Zander apparently mentioned to his dad that he needs to get a Tesla because it's so quiet. Eric was not amused - he also wouldn't find one useful yet, he needs a truck for his construction business.

 

 

 

 

The T5 arrived, it's nice and compact.  Probably has an mSATA drive in it like the one I bought for New New Toy. For now I've split it with a 250 GB partition for the dash cam and a 750 GB one for music. Currently copying over the music from my USB Stick, should take about an hour. I'm copying from the old stick as it already has the music converted from Apple Lossless to Flac.

 

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

After visiting my aunt and uncle in Green Bay (reply 26) we returned to my brother's where a gathering of friends & family was well underway:

 

 

 

 

Randy, one of the neighbors, manned the grill:

 

 

 

 

And I finally got to meet the newest member of the Spice family, my nephew Justin's daughter Mia (Amelia Jean Spice):

 

 

 

 

 

My nephew's a huge Star Wars fanatic, you might recall his bB project Deathstar Break in from 13 years ago. His mom ordered him a custom doormat:

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

On Thursday uncle Gary and aunt Pat stopped by for a visit:

 

 

 

Back in the late 90s I started buying Chevron Cars for my nephew Justin, here's a few photos from 98-99:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Besides Justin, his brothers Brandin, Mason, and Logan as well as their many friends have played with them over the years.  They've proven to be extremely durable, so Justin's daughter Mia now gets to play with them! You can see a video of her playing with them in this Facebook post.

 

 

 

 

We had a relaxing afternoon before the drive back on Friday.

 

 

 

 

I tried a local brew, it was odd.

 

[+SpiceWare]

And Friday morning we left while Mia played with a Whataburger Train in her new Spiderman PJs.

 

 

 

 

Closeup of the train from an ebay auction

 

 

 

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

I'm working up something about the trip for the upcoming National Drive Electric Week.  Any input?