May 2024 – Dave Saari

Pat and Dave’s Easy EV Road Trip – PART 3: The Trip Home and EV Performance Summary

May 27, 2024 by davesaari

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I described our travels from Minneapolis, MN to Pigeon Forge, TN, and our visits to two National Parks, New River Gorge NP in West Virginia and Great Smoky Mountains NP in Tennessee. This final episode provides a brief summary of our trip back home and some details of how our new EV performed on the road trip.

Wednesday, April 24, 2024: We left the Golf Vista on Dollywood Lane shortly after 9 AM and headed eastward, stopping to charge the car at a place called Buccees in Crossville, TN. We’d never heard of Buccees before, but it’s apparently a very popular fuel and convenience store chain in the southeastern US. We were absolutely amazed by the place. There had to be sixty or more gas pumps in addition to two charging stations – a Tesla Supercharger bank with 16 chargers and a ChargePoint station with four chargers (interestingly bearing Mercedes Benz logos). The convenience store was huge – easily as big as large truck stops such as Loves or Pilot – and was filled with an amazing array of ready-to-eat foods, groceries, gift items, and such. One especially unique feature was an array of about twenty or thirty different types of custom-made beef jerky. We bought a bag and it was delicious. I’d recommend Buccees as a welcome stop for travelers of all stripes.

Tesla Superchargers at Buccees — hardly anyone using it, as usual

After charging the car, we drove to the Stones River National Battlefield in Murfreesboro, TN, for our final point of interest before sprinting for home. This site, operated by the National Park Service, memorializes the Battle of Stones River, which took place from December 31, 1862 through January 2, 1863. Union forces squeaked out a victory in a bloody conflict there, boosting morale in the North and gaining control of central Tennessee. Of the major battles in the Civil War, Stones River had the highest percentage of casualties on both sides.

We first stopped in at an impressive Visitors Center with interesting displays about the battle and its aftermath and then strolled around the 600-acre site to see several key battleground areas and the large National Cemetery in which more than 6,100 Union soldiers are buried, including more than 2,500 who were never identified. We left with a somber feeling, with a new appreciation for the immense toll that the Civil War took on the soldiers who fought in it and their surviving families and loved ones.

Then we headed off to another charging stop just southeast of Nashville and then on to the Hampton Inn in Pleasant View, TN. We enjoyed a meal at a little place called Firecracker Pizza near the hotel before turning in for the evening.

Thursday, April 25, and Friday, April 26, 2024: Our last two days were uneventful, including a drive to the Hampton Inn O’Fallon near St. Louis for our final night’s stay and then a long (for us) eleven-hour drive home as the weather turned cold and rainy. As we trundled our luggage up to our fifth-floor condo, we felt very satisfied with our Easy EV Road Trip. Here’s a recap:

EV Performance: Now for some information (hopefully not too nerdy) about how our new EV performed on the Road Trip. Hopefully this will be of interest to readers who may be considering purchasing an EV or who may feel hesitant about it due to perceived EV problems.

Many questions are related to charging an EV. How much does it cost? How long does it take? How hard is it to find chargers? I’ll answer these questions based on actual data from our Easy EV Road Trip. Details of our charging sessions during the trip are provided in this table:

One thing I’ve heard from a number of people is that, with electric costs rising due to inflation, operating an EV is too expensive. So, what did we actually spend on electricity during this Road Trip? $238.94, including the pre-trip charging at home in the condo garage. How would that compare to the identical trip with an internal combustion engine (ICE) car? If we assume an average gas price of $2.60, based on what we observed on various gas station signs along the way, fueling an ICE car would cost the same as what we spent on charging the EV if it got 37.2 mpg. (If gasoline prices miraculously fell to $2.50, an ICE car would only need to get 29.1 mpg to break even with the EV, but if it spiked to $4.00, it would need to get 46.5 mpg for an equivalent fuel cost.) Put it this way – the plethora of large pickup trucks and SUVs we observed along the way are costing a lot more to take on a road trip, while a Toyota or Honda hybrid would cost a bit less.

It’s important to understand that using high-speed (Level 3) chargers (such as the Tesla Superchargers we used) is the absolute most expensive way to charge an EV. By comparison, slow (Level 1) charging at our condo with a simple 110V circuit costs less than half as much, or intermediate (Level 2) charging at our Lake Superior cabin, with a reduced off-peak rate, costs less than a fifth as much. Equivalent-cost ICE cars would need to get 77.2 mpg or 193.7 mpg to compete with these Level 1 and Level 2 chargers, and I can guarantee there are no such ICE cars in existence anywhere. So, if you consider that road trips probably represent a very small percentage of the total driving that any of us do, an EV with a Level 1 or Level 2 home charger is far less costly to operate than an ICE car.

Another issue for EV hesitance is the time required for charging stops on a road trip. So, just how long did we spend charging the car on our Easy EV Road Trip. As the table above shows, the total charging time for the 17 stops was 468 minutes (7.8 hours) with an average of 27.5 minutes per stop. We generally used that time for something more or less productive, such as eating lunch, buying groceries, using the rest room, watching a Netflix movie on the Tesla screen, etc., so it didn’t really feel like wasted time. However, if getting to your destination as fast as possible is a high priority, the time spent charging is a significant detriment.

To put it in perspective, the comparable time for fueling an ICE car depends on the size of its gas tank and the car’s mileage. Calculations I did based on a Honda Accord hybrid, a light-duty pickup, and a heavy-duty pickup showed minimum total time for fueling over a 2,777 mile Road Trip would be 49.7 minutes, 55.1 minutes, and 59.3 minutes, respectively (assuming ten minutes per fill up), for a saving of nearly 7 hours compared to our EV, although some of that time would be eaten up by the aforementioned eating, shopping, etc. This would easily allow the trip to be completed in a day less, although Pat and I – retirees both – don’t like to drive for more than 4 hours a day anyway, so the savings would be meaningless to us. A good deal of this aversion to long driving times comes from the stress induced by other drivers — huge pickups that tailgate menacingly, freeway mergers who insist on reaching their final merge point at exactly the same position as our car — or driving conditions such as endless stretches of road construction or heavy wind or rain, to name but a few.

Probably the biggest factor in EV hesitance is range anxiety – will an EV driver be able to get to the next charging station before running out of power? The new Tesla Model 3 proved to be excellent in this regard. The quoted range is 324 miles under ideal conditions, and we found that the actual distance traveled averaged 93.4% of the range estimated by the car during the Road Trip. We generally recharged the car when it dropped below 20% of battery capacity and charged it to 80-90% of full at each stop. A major reason we bought the Tesla is the large number of Superchargers that have been deployed all across the country, and we never had any anxiety about reaching one in time. Planning the stops was very easy; we used two methods. The simplest way was to give a voice command, e.g. “Navigate to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee,” and let the car map out recommended charging stops. Sometimes we used an app called ABRP (for A Better Route Planner) to check out alternate routes – this app can be customized to use actual performance data from a specific car and/or to specify such things as minimum charging time, avoiding tolls, and the like.) Thus, the trip truly lived up to my claim as Pat and Daves Easy EV Road Trip. I can’t offer any insight regarding road trips in non-Tesla EVs, however.

One final note about the Tesla. Coincidentally, just before we left on the trip, Tesla decided to give all or most Teslas on the road a free month of what they call “Supervised Full Self Driving” capability, so we decided to try it out during the trip. The video below shows how it worked – quite well and rather fun.

Tesla “Supervised Full Self Driving” demonstration

It also included automatic parking in parking lots and automatic parallel parking on streets. However, neither of us was comfortable letting the car drive itself, and we also felt that the price for this feature — $ 99 per month or $4,000 dollars for the life of the car – was too steep, so we did not pick it up after the free trial. The car still has what Tesla calls “Autopilot,” which is adaptive cruise control, and “Autosteer,” which maintains the car within the driving lane and automatically steers around curves.

While the above considerations are all related to practical matters – cost, time, level of anxiety – they do not speak to the major reason to buy an EV, which is to help slow the inexorable advance of climate change. While I’m afraid that the drivers of those menacing, tailgating pickup trucks will merely scoff at that idea, I hope it can influence some readers; after all, doesn’t helping to save the planet seem more important than saving a little time on a road trip?

OK, that’s it! Thanks for reading, and please consider joining the EV universe!

Pat and Dave’s Easy EV Road Trip – PART 2: The Great Smokies

May 15, 2024 by davesaari

In Part 1 of this series, I described our travels from Minneapolis, MN to Pigeon Forge, TN, where we stayed at a VRBO rental called Golf Vista, on Dollywood Lane. (Alas, we did not visit Dollywood, though we were close enough to hear the choo-choo train that presumably ferried visitors around the park.) This episode focuses on the five days we spent in the Great Smoky Mountains area.

Friday, April 19, 2024: For our first day’s foray, we drove to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (the 20^th National Park we have visited so far).

Photo of National Park Map (apologies for the quality)

Getting there was surprisingly slow as we crawled our way through Pigeon Forge. It turned out that we were in town during the weekend that Pigeon Forge was hosting an annual event called the Rod Run – a hugely popular auto show with multiple venues and events – and the roads through town were absolutely packed with visitors. Once past Pigeon Forge, however, traffic was moderate and we moved along quickly.

We learned that this National Park also does not charge for admittance, like the New River Gorge in West Virgina, once again rendering my lifetime Senior Pass moot. However, visitors are required to display parking passes if they plan to stop for 15 minutes or more to visit the various visitor centers, points of interest, or hiking trails. We bought a one-week pass for $15, which seemed very reasonable. Our driving route on Friday is shown on the image below (from my Google Timeline).

The Timeline approximates the route as a series of straight lines, but the roads in the National Park wind their way through the woods and are often quite narrow.

Virtually every road we drove on in the park was very smooth and well maintained, however, making for a very scenic and enjoyable drive. Our first destination was the so-called Cades Cove Loop, an 11-mile road at the southwest corner of the route shown in the Timeline above. The loop is a narrow, one-way road in the area where the earliest residents had their farms and homesteads, with designated parking spots on either side at various overlooks and points of interest. Many historical buildings have been restored and maintained, including an old mill originally powered by water from a creek that flows nearby – the water still flows from the creek through a long, wooden flume to the water wheel.

It took us a couple of hours to make the circuit, including several photo stops and a walking visit in the vicinity of the Cades Cove Visitor Center. The loop road was pretty busy, with frequent slowdowns or stoppages as cars pulled into and out of the parking areas. We understand that during the summer peak season the loop road is more like a parking lot, so we were happy to be visiting during a quieter time. After Cades Cove, we drove to the Sugarlands Visitor Center for a brief stop and then back to home base on Dollywood Lane. Here are some photos from the Cade’s Cove loop and the road to the Sugarland Visitor Center.

Along the Road to Sugarlands Visitor Center

For the return trip, our navigation system sent us along something called Gnatty Branch Road, which was just as narrow and winding as the National Park Roads, but in terrible condition and flanked by a wide range of structures – from new and modern to sad and ramshackle. Thankfully, the road eventually teed into a much better track (unfortunately named Boogertown Road), which was jam-packed with traffic heading into town for the Rod Run. (There were moments during this part of the trip I could swear I heard dueling banjos being played, but I think that was just a trick of the mind.) Once back at the Golf Vista, we settled in for a quiet evening watching action TV shows on a newly discovered (to us) network called ION.

Saturday, April 20, 2024: Here is my Timeline map for our second day in the Smokies area.

Google Timeline Image — Saturday, April 20

I know it doesn’t look like much – it merely shows us driving eastward (away from the Rod Run mayhem) to a fantastic barbecue place called Preacher’s Smokehouse, where we enjoyed an excellent dinner. We got a sampler plate for two, resulting in enough leftovers for a couple more meals later on back at the Golf Vista. So, what did we do all day before dinnertime? Let’s focus in on that blue blob on the left part of the Timeline for a clue.

Yes, that shows me playing 18 holes at the Gatlinburg Golf Course, where Pat dropped me off at 9:45 AM before heading off to do a bit of exploring and shopping in Pigeon Forge. Per the Timeline image above, Google seemed to think I was walking the course, but I actually took a cart since it would be my first time golfing with my new knees, and I didn’t wat to overdo it. I’m happy to report that the knees held up just fine. The golf swing didn’t hold up as well – I had a wide range of shots, from the pretty good to the absolutely pathetic, but all in all it was good for the first time out.

The Scenic 12th Hole on the Gatlinburg Golf Course

Pat reported that it was too busy for comfort in town, which prompted her to find the barbecue spot for dinner, in the opposite direction from the inrushing Rod Run fans.

Sunday, April 21, 2024: The highlight of the day was going to a fancy place in Gatlinburg for Pat’s 67^th birthday, as shown on the Timeline map below.

The Greenbrier Restaurant is located in the woods above the main part of Gatlinburg, and the road became very winding and fairly narrow as we approached it, providing for some pre-dinner excitement. The atmosphere, the food, and the service were all quite nice – I’d recommend it for any readers looking for a nice restaurant in the area.

Before going to dinner, we spent some time exploring Pigeon Forge as shown on the expanded image below.

Although the Timeline implies that we walked all the way to town, we actually drove a short distance and parked near the transit center before walking along a nice path around town called the Riverwalk. During this walk, we saw some interesting wildlife. I found it interesting that the Great Smoky National Park boasts of a huge number of wildlife species, yet almost the only non-human species we encountered during the entire trip were found on this walk through the town of Pigeon Forge.

Wildlife in Pigeon Forge (Not too Impressive)

Monday, April 22, 2024: We again set out by car to visit the National Park on our fourth full day in the Smokies.

We left the Golf Vista at a little before 10 AM, driving to the Clingmans Dome Visitor Center and then hiking to Clingmans Dome. At an elevation of 6,643 feet, Clingmans dome is the highest point in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It is the highest point in Tennessee, and the third highest mountain east of the Mississippi. The half-mile walk from the visitor center to the observation tower on top of Clingmans Dome is quite steep, and I found myself huffing and puffing and requiring a couple of sit-downs along the way. The views from the top are stunning, however, making it well worth the effort. Some of the pictures show the characteristic blue haze that gives rise to the name of the mountains. (It’s caused by vapor molecules released by the mountains’ vegetation, which scatter blue light from the sky.)

Interestingly, the Appalachian Trail crosses the path to the Dome more than once, so we each had to take a quick side trip on it so we can boast of hiking the Appalachian Trail – at least thirty feet worth.

The drive up to and back from Clingmans Dome was gorgeous, as the steep road wound back and forth alongside and across various creeks and streams. We made numerous stops to ogle, ooh, and aah, including an extended look around at the so-called Newfound Gap. I’ll let the pictures do the talking …

Returning from Clingmans Dome and Newfound Gap

We also explored a section of the National Park that is accessible from Gatlinburg called the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail. We drove along a narrow, one-way road that loops through the forest, up into and down out of the mountains and back to Gatlinburg. We saw that there were multiple points of interest and hiking trails. We didn’t stop to explore any of them, but vowed to come back on Tuesday to have a longer visit and a good hike.

We got back to Golf Vista at about 2:30 PM, and I was feeling frisky enough for another foray at the Gatlinburg Golf Course, so I abandoned Pat to her own devices, drove across the street, and began my second attempt at golfing at just about 3:00.

This looks pretty much like the first try, except for that 1,000+ yard driver shot into Pigeon Forge on the left. That’s actually some sort of Google glitch, though – I can’t hit a ball that far anymore. This time, my performance ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, though overall a bit better than the first try. The main takeaway was again that my knees held up well, and I returned to Golf Vista with a smile on my face.

Tuesday, April 23, 2024: True to our word, we returned to the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail. This time, we found a parking spot near the Trillium Gap Trailhead and hiked along the trail for 1.4 miles to the Grotto Falls.

Google Timeline Image, Tuesday, April 23

Trillium Gap Trailhead along Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail

On this walk, we finally encountered some wildlife, including a few deer grazing near the trail and a large black bear with three little cubs. The deer were very cooperative models, but the bears were up in a tree across the river near the falls and my attempt at a picture was a dud. For safety’s sake, we didn’t try to get close enough for a picture, but it was fun to see them from afar.

The trail was moderately challenging for my knees but very scenic, and the Grotto Falls were beautiful. Again, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

After our hike, we made our way back to Gatlinburg along the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail, stopping several times along the way for more photo ops.

View from Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail

Finally, we headed back to Golf Vista and then to the Tesla Supercharger to “fuel up” for the beginning of our drive home on Wednesday. The most impressive thing about that short jaunt was the absolute lack of traffic, as the infamous Rod Run had ended on Sunday.

That’s it for this episode. In Part 3, I’ll give a quick summary of our return to Minneapolis. Also, for those who may be interested in learning more about taking an EV on a road trip, I’ll provide some details on how the new Tesla performed and what extra planning we needed to do compared with a trip using an ICE car. Stay tuned!

Pat and Dave’s Easy EV Road Trip – PART 1: Overview

May 3, 2024 by davesaari

As past readers know, for the past several years I’ve been documenting some of our travel experiences through blog posts. (The most recent of these was entitled Pat and Dave’s Magical Maritime Meanderings, describing our travels in September of 2023 to the Maritime Provinces of Canada.) We are among those most fortunate of people who are able to travel about the world in our Golden Years, and we are constantly discussing ideas for where to go next. Travel during the 2023-2024 winter season was off the table, however, since I had decided to have both my arthritic knees replaced. The left knee operation took place on October 18, 2023 and the right one on January 19, 2024, leaving me in a state that I call “knee-hab” – physical therapy sessions and daily home exercises to rehabilitate the knees. In part to give me something fun to look forward to at the end of all that, Pat suggested that we take a road trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in mid-April, by which time we figured I’d be able to drive and walk around – not to mention play golf – reasonably well with the new knees.

Seizing on this idea, Pat located a condo in Pigeon Forge, TN, which, according to the internet, was close to the National Park but also within a stone’s throw of the Gatlinburg Golf Course. I eagerly booked a one-week stay at the condo, called Golf Vista, for April 18-24, 2024 through VRBO. As I labored through the winter months with various knee flexes, leg lifts, wall squats, and twice-daily jaunts on the stationary bike, the prospect of the upcoming Smoky Mountains road trip helped me maintain a positive frame of mind. Day-dreaming of eagles and birdies in Tennessee (both the avian kind and the golfing kind) motivated me to keep going with the knee-hab, and the new joints gradually recovered.

Meanwhile, we also made the decision to buy a new Tesla Model 3, for reasons which are not entirely clear in retrospect – a combination of the potential for a new EV rebate, which unfortunately failed to materialize, and my unbridled enthusiasm for the EV revolution. We thus become an all-EV couple, as our former ICE car is now being used by our youngest son. Once we realized that the new car would be delivered before we left for the Great Smokies, the road trip became even more exciting as a chance to give the new EV a thorough shakedown.

Against that backdrop, we began planning details of the trip – to the extent that we actually plan anything – during the first two weeks of April. The map below shows the complete trip, including the various places where we stayed and where we charged the car. All of the hotel stays were for a single night except for the one-week stay at the Golf Vista. We picked the various hotel stops by limiting our daily driving time to about four hours so that, starting out on April 14, we would easily get to Pigeon Forge by the 18^th. The map doesn’t show all the places we visited during our week in Pigeon Forge – I’ll expand on that in Part 2 of the series. I’ll also provide some detailed information about how the new car performed (including the cost and duration for charging) in Part 3, for those who might be interested in learning more about taking an EV road trip.

**Pat and Dave’s Easy EV Road Trip — April 14-26, 2024**

Getting There, April 14 – 18, 2024: As planned, we left the condo on the morning of April 14^th and drove to our first hotel stop in Madison, WI. There’s not much to tell about the first three days – driving, charging, eating, sleeping – so let’s skip ahead to the first point of interest.

On Wednesday, April 17^th, we visited the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve in West Virginia, the nineteenth National Park we have visited so far in our travels. Despite its name, the New River is actually one of the five oldest rivers in the world, older than the Appalachian Mountains through which it flows. Its origins are in South Carolina, flowing northward for 360 miles through Virginia and West Virginia before joining with the Gauley River to form the Kanawha River, which eventually flows into the Ohio River. One explanation for the name of the river is that a mapmaker added it to the Fry-Jefferson map of Virginia, which did not show the river when first published in 1753, thus adding the “new river” to the old map. A 53-mile stretch of the New River in West Virginia – the so-called New River Gorge – was designated as a National River in 1978 and placed under supervision of the National Park Service. It was designated as the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve on December 27, 2020, essentially becoming America’s newest National Park.

We first went to the Canyon Rim Visitor Center, where I eagerly offered my National Parks Senior Pass for admittance, only to learn that New River Gorge is a free park. I couldn’t decide whether to be disappointed that I wasn’t getting anything special with my pass or happy that the Government makes the lovely park available to all for free. Anyway, the visitor center had some nice displays about the geography, flora, and fauna of the National Park, and the walking paths afforded stunning overlooks of the river and the large bridge that crosses it.

**New River Gorge Overlook from Canyon Rim Visitor Center**

**Viewing Platform on the Visitor Center Grounds**

**Proof of Visit? Another of my lousy selfies …**

**New River Gorge Bridge — from Viewing Platform**

**River Gorge from Viewing Platform with Fayette Station Road on Left and Bridge Below**

We then took the Fayette Station Road Driving Tour, a very narrow and winding eight-mile road that descends from the visitor center to the river below and crosses a rickety-looking bridge before climbing back up to the town of Fayetteville, WV. We stopped at several places along the way to admire the scenery.

**Along the Fayette Station Road Driving Tour**

**Fayette Station Road — Tunney Hunsacker Bridge**

**New River and Tunney Hunsacker Bridge**

We then drove to the Sandstone Visitor Center, then followed the highway along the river southward to the town of Hinton. We crossed the river and drove northward on the other side to the Sandstone Falls Boardwalk for a close-up view of the Sandstone Falls. As you see below, the falls extend across the full width of the river, making it impossible to see the entire span at once, but the excellent boardwalk provided many nice photo opportunities.

**Another Portion of the Sandstone Falls**

After our time spent ogling the New River Gorge, we proceeded southward to Wytheville, VA, where we spent our last hotel night before the week’s stay in Pigeon Forge. On Thursday, April 18^th, we headed for the Golf Vista, located appropriately on Dollywood Lane, with a stop along the way at Saltville, VA. We visited a fascinating place called the Museum of the Middle Appalachians, which included a wide array of displays including ancient fossils, ice-age mammoth skeletons, dioramas and artifacts from indigenous peoples, development of the important salt mining industry, the famous Civil War Battle of Saltville, and transition to the 20^th century industrial age and the residual pollution issues. Before heading off for the final drive to Pigeon Forge, we also stopped at one of the Saltville Battle sites, which turned out to be a dud, but we vowed to visit a more interesting Civil War Battlefield site later during the trip.

**Saltville Battle Site — not much to see …**

I’ll stop for now, but stay tuned for Part 2, in which I’ll describe our week exploring the Great Smoky Mountains and local environs from our base at the Golf Vista on Dollywood Lane.