From Bakersfield we headed almost
due west to Atascadero, a cute little town just inland of the coastal mountain
range. We were still in the valley so
the roads were flat, but there was an almost imperceptible increase in
elevation. You probably wouldn’t have
noticed it at all in a gas-powered car but the Tesla energy graph made it
abundantly clear that we were climbing.*
Having completed the trip**, I
can confidently say Atascadero wins the Best SuperCharger Location Award for
the #TeslaElectricStartupSuperTrip. The
competition wasn’t even close. The
A-Town SuperCharger is a 5-minute walk from a cute little downtown with a
fantastic burger place called Sylvester’s.
Had it been any day other than Sunday, we would have had to decide
between Sylvester’s and a number of other tasty places to eat.
 |
| LJ at Sylvester's in Atascadero, CA |
After lunch, we continued
westward until we reached US-1, the iconic coastal road that winds its way
along the Pacific. It was clear that we
had reached the Left Coast when I saw this grizzled old man walking his huge
orange cat. I felt a bit bad taking his
picture until LJ pointed out that the guy had a huge grin on his face.
 |
| Welcome to the Left Coast (San Luis Obispo County, CA) |
We took scenic US-1 up the coast,
stopping at various viewpoints along the way.
My favorite was the elephant seals colony in San Luis
Obispo, only a
few miles north of the Hearst Castle. There were piles of elephant seals snuggling
together, with a few of the young ones clearly not wanting to nap. And there was a random squirrel not too far
from this sleeping elephant seal—not exactly two mammals I would expect to see
together. The clouds rolling up from the
ocean and over the first range of mountains kept things cool and cloudy for
most of the trip up the coast except where the road rose above the clouds.
*******
The final SuperCharger stop of
the trip was at the Gilroy outlets.
Gilroy’s claim to fame is as the
“Garlic Capital of the World”. This was the first location where we saw more
than three Teslas—a total of six Telsas (including ours) were parked there when
we first started charging around 6:30 pm.
We killed the charging time by doing a bit more shopping for LJ’s new
job. [LJ and I probably shopped more on
this trip than we have in our lives together to this point. It’s a side effect of the Tesla charging
locations and the 30-60 minutes we needed to spend at each one.]
Post-charging, we had dinner with
Jocelyn (a friend of LJ’s from Cisco) at Los Gatos Brewery, an old haunt for LJ
and his Cisco friends from business trips many years back. About 10 pm we rolled into Menlo Park and
unloaded the car at LJ’s new temporary CA home.
*******
The trip may be over, but the super-nerdy
science and engineering discussions are not.
I’m working on a final blog post with all sorts of stats and graphs
about our trip that I hope to post this week.
*One of the more fascinating
things about driving the Tesla is the energy graph. I’ve shown examples of it in previous blogs,
but here’s another one as a reminder.
For any stretch of road, if we aim to keep the speed constant, the
energy usage ends up almost directly proportional to the elevation
changes. In that case, the energy graph
is essentially a topographical map of where we’ve been.
 |
| Tesla energy usage as topographical map. |
**For those of you keeping track
at home: Day 1 of the trip was Sunday, November 2nd. Therefore, Day 8 was Sunday, November 9th. It’s probably not unexpected that it took me
longer to complete this blog post since I returned to “normal” life in NC this
week.
Day 8 stats:
398.0 miles in 12 hours (with
long charging and meal stops) having used 110.9 kWh and 2 SuperChargers:
·
Atascadero,
CA
·
Gilroy,
CA
Overall
trip: 4225.6
miles in 8 days, having used 1455.5kWh at an average energy usage of 344 Wh/mi
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