A quick note of thanks to the Beatles for inspiring the title for this series of posts. This is the sixth in a series of posts written about our trip that will be published four weeks to the day of the trip.
Day 6 – Drive on Thursday, May 7, 2015
Our goal today is to get to Copley, OH. A day earlier than we had adjusted to, but enough time to catch dinner with my cousin and his family. Luckily, we eat dinner late, so that can be a lot later than when other people “usually” have dinner.
Hampton Inn South Bend
We ended the previous evening’s rated range at 79 miles when we parked the car and woke the car up the next morning with 80 miles of rated range. Another one of those days where the mileage went up from when we turned in.
This time, I was able to take a picture.
I remembered to mute the audio before I started the drive to reposition the car to the front of the hotel to make it easier to load it when we drive off for the day. No “Van Halen” surprises this morning.
Mishawaka Supercharger
The Mishawaka Supercharger was about four miles from our hotel. We took surface streets to get there because that’s what the navigation provided us. So, I don’t know how difficult or easy it is to get to this charger from the Interstate/Turnpike.
What’s the difference between an Interstate and a Turnpike anyway? Well… It would seem that the difference is the “toll”. Once we entered Illinois the previous day, they started to charge us for driving on the road. I thought my taxes already covered the highway system, apparently I was wrong. So, have to get used to that and factor that in the drive. So, I guess I should be happy that the navigation took us on a surface street to get to the Mishawaka Supercharger from the hotel.
If comparing the mileage between the 80 that I had in the morning with the 72 on the dash when we started charging with the 4 or so miles to get there, please note that I remembered to COOL the car down with pre-conditioning as it was a HOT (the temperature at 10:00 am was already 85F/29.4C, without wind) day in South Bend when we decided to pull out of the hotel and I turned the air conditioning on full blast.
When one is traveling on electricity, it’s easy to turn the car on for “convenience” reasons.
Another one of these mall locations that are located at the far edge.
We just hung out at the car for this charge. We get a chance to make calls, check e-mails, and the like when we supercharge the car. That Barnes and Noble looks big and as with most Barnes and Noble offer free wi-fi.
Yes, as usual… a WATER TOWER picture.
Which leads to something that my wife wanted to suggest to the Tesla Supercharger folks. Why not add a LOCATION sign to each supercharger? Whether painted on the supercharger itself or in the location. That way, when one takes a picture of a supercharger, the location is embedded in the photo.
I told her, I didn’t know why, but agreed that this is a good idea.
So, we headed out of Mishawaka on the way to Copley, OH.
The Indiana countryside had a more interesting view.
Before we left Indiana for Ohio, we stopped off at the Angola Supercharger.
Angola Supercharger
We had enough range to skip this supercharger, but we did tell our friends at Teslarati that we would be helping with the beta of the (now released) Teslarati App for iOS and post content for the stop, so, we decided to swing by and stop.
We were thrown off by the location of the Angola Supercharger. There is an outlet mall nearly adjacent to the exit from the Turnpike/I-80/I-90, but the supercharger was not located there.
Instead it is located just below a Ramada Hotel a few miles away. This location has a great view of the valley below, but I was concerned that in the winter, with ice and snow, the ascent to the superchargers might be “tough.”
We tried to capture the steepness of the drive into the supercharger location, but we were unable to get it with the photograph.
Our friends from @TeslaRoadtrip stuck a sticker at one of the chargers from their 2014 cross-country trip to TMC Connect 2014. I wonder if they’ll be doing the same thing when they head West from the East Coast for TMC Connect 2015.
Once again, not a necessary stop, but nice views from the supercharger station.
This might be the best way to show how steep it was from the driveway to the supercharger. It’s a view from the base of the driveway toward the superchargers.
We had a quick charge and headed to Ohio, and the short trek through the state to get to Copley, OH.
We had some pretty interesting things that we saw in Ohio, on the way to Maumee Supercharger.
First, we crossed into Ohio.
Some cool Ohio farms.
Some really old barns… (shouldn’t they be demolished if they looked like this.)
It’s interesting to note that folks who live so far apart from their neighbors like they do in the Ohio farm communities.
Probably know their neighbors better than we do in suburban Southern California. At least I would venture to guess that would be the case.
We had SOME excitement on the drive to the Maumee supercharger, we got some confirmation on how they repair such large power lines.
I would be SO freaked out by that, and these guys made it look “easy.”
Maumee Supercharger
The supercharger in Maumee, OH was difficult to find. It was not very close to the highway. It was located toward the back of the road that it was installed in.
Hiding the superchargers from the road were several fast food restaurants in front of chargers.
The Steak Escape was entrepreneurial in that they offer Tesla travelers a discount.
Since we were planning on having dinner with family, we didn’t take them up on their discounted meal for Tesla travelers.
As you can see from the statistics, we could easily have made it here and skipped Angola, but was glad to have stopped there, if anything just to take pictures and make notes.
And with that, we decided to press on. Our original plan was to go to charge at Macedonia, OH as those superchargers are close to Copley. But decided to skip that and just head to my cousin’s house.
More barns on the way to Copley.
Was that hay or a roll of fiber optics?
Sunset over Ohio.
Copley, OH
And with that, we finally made our goal for the next few days. We made it to Copley, OH. To minimize losing the ten miles that we did at our worst stop, we plug at my cousin’s home at 110V and get 12A of charging.
As we used to do with the Active E and to prevent the temptation to steal our really long extension cord, we drive the car on top of the cable so that it can not be taken without rolling the car.
We’re getting three miles per hour on this connection. (It actually speeds up to four miles per hour later in the cycle.) We plugged in the evening with 75 Miles of Rated Range and went in to have dinner with the family.
Go on to Day 7. Click here.
