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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.