We’re off! #
I think of all of our trips, we spent the least time planning this one. We have lodging selected so far for 2 nights on what we expect to be about 3 weeks of travel. Sure, we’re in-country, so buying anything we need should be pretty straight forward. And we’ve done some preparation. We got a CCS adapter and bike rack for Rosie, both of which had fairly long lead times. And we got a handful of charging apps on our phones. But otherwise, we’re throwing some clothes in the car and heading off on an adventure.
We still didn’t manage to actually get out of the house until late morning, but this turned out to be fine. Our first stop was the Rivan Adventure Network in Waynesboro. Rosie wanted us to charge to full there because we’d be going through West Virginia next. It may be a verdant paradise, but it’s a EV charging desert. So, we did charge to full, and we had our first experience of refuling ourselves while refuling (or reenergizing) the car. This would become a common theme. We had lunch at Osaka III which we enjoyed. Part of the reason for having Japanese cuisine at this stage was the expecation that as we got further inland, we’d see fewer and fewer Japanese restaurants. As you’ll see if you keep reading, Japanese, in fact, became one of the few types of cuisine we could find regularly throughout our journey.
Our refueling finished, we headed west on I-64. I-64 West spends a little too much time on I-81 South for my liking, but it wasn’t too terribly long before we were actually heading west again. By this time, we’d fired up our playlist and were humming along both literally and figuratively.
Before long, we hit West Virginia. Not a new state for any of us, but a good marker for westward travel. Our intent was to put some serious miles behind us while we were in familiar territory, so it was nice to see a new state!
Transit through WV was pleasant and straightforward. We did have to stop to charge once, and we were able to take advantage of the NACS->CCS adapter by stopping at the Tesla Supercharger in Marmet, WV. Not long after I pulled up and plugged in, one of the Tesla drivers came over to chat with me and ask about Rosie. I was a little worried that he considered me an interloper on his private network, but that was not the case at all. He was warm, and curious, and happy to share. As we were going to be there for a while, we decided to walk around and explore Marmet. There’s not a lot to Marmet; it’s a town of ~1,500 people. The focus on coal was interesting though. Marmet was named for the Marmet Coal Company, and while we were there, a long train went by full of coal. Marmet is not too far outside of Charleston though, so there was also canary in the coal mine imagery from the Charleston “Dirty Birds”. We observed “energy orientation” in several places on the trip, but few as apparently core to the identity as coal was here.
From there, we made it into Ohio without incident.
Our target for the night was Columbus. We wanted to charge (and eat) before settling in at the hotel, so we stopped in Pickerington, OH at an EVgo for Rosie, and MacKenzie River Pizza, Grill & Pub for us. The EVgo was a bit of a disappointment. The first charger we plugged into gave us a 5kW charge rate which would have taken well into the morning. But there was a $1 “connection fee”. So, we switched to an adjacent one, and started to get a decent charge (max 171kW) , so we headed off to dinner. Unfortunately, only 23 minutes into that charge, and in the middle of dinner, I got an alert that charging had stopped and my grace period had begun. So, I got up and darted back to the vehicle. It had made it up to 61% and the charger decided “no more”. So, we moved it one more time, finished topping it off, and finished dinner.
Charging done, we headed to our hotel for the night booked last minute through Hotwire – a Mariott just off of the Olentangy river. It was our first night parking with the bikes “out in the open”, so I worried slightly about them, and just the length of the vehicle. But we had the locks that we’d gotten from Quikrstuff and an additional cable to run through the frames, and we managed to keep the bikes for the whole trip!