It's electric!

Today's blog post is brought to you by the letter E for electric.  Electric car, that is--specifically, the Tesla Model S that will take us cross-country to CA over the next week or so.  LJ just started a new job in CA and will be living out there for a few months.  Tesla has a supercharger route across the northern part of the US.  New job + Tesla superchargers = road trip!

The route shown on the Google maps snapshot below was planned out using evtripplanner.com, which is "working to provide information and tools that make driving an Electric Vehicle (EV) easier".  Starting early tomorrow, the first couple days we'll put the pedal to the metal to make tracks across the eastern part of the US and then slow down and enjoy the scenery across the Midwest and western US.  On this trip, we'll be picking up an extra state on our list of states visited--South Dakota.  We're also planning to stop by a number of national parks and national monuments on the way.  Let us know if you have any suggestions of cool places along the way that we might otherwise miss.  (Yes, we were already told that we will go straight past the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD.)

We'll be channeling some serious travel-nerd capabilities as we go.  There's the Model S, a car in a class of travel all its own that necessitates forward planning not needed with a good old gasoline-powered car.  And we'll be burning through hotel points and staying at friends' houses wherever we can. 


On a recent trip down memory lane, I started thinking about the some of the big road trips I've done.  The last time I was a passenger on a long road trip was only a few years ago on various jaunts around Ghana, the trip to Mole National Park being one of the more memorable rides.  But the last time I was a driver on a trip like this was almost literally half a lifetime ago, when I drove myself from Boulder to the Bay area for an internship in the summer of 2000.

That trip to Silicon Valley started in mid-May with a paper map printed from Yahoo maps that took me from Boulder to the gates of Rocky Mountain National where I was surprised to learn that the road through the park was still closed for the winter.  The detour that got me around the park eventually led me into a snowstorm in Utah where I was pretty convinced that my car would veer into a snowdrift and I wouldn't be found until July.  Thankfully the current weather forecasts for the next few days make it unlikely that there will be a repeat of this fiasco on this trip.  But I'm packing the emergency blankets and granola bars just in case.