These reports and photos are of a road trip from Anaheim, California, to the 2nd Annual Midwest Tesla Gathering in St. Louis, Missouri. My wife and I are doing this trip in our new red 2016 Tesla Model X P90DL. This particular report is of Day 4, a day in Salina, Kansas.
Note: This report is a rough draft. I have not yet done a spell check or final edits. Since we are driving this road trip right now, devoting time to driving takes priority. As I get time at our stays along the way I'll make final edits and spelling corrections. But for now, please pardon any errors.
Not much to report for this particular day! I spent most of the day in our hotel in Salina, Kansas, working on processing the photos and writing the report of the prior two days of our travel.
It was a bit of a frustrating day. After we checked into this Holiday Inn Express and got to our room, we found that the internet was very unreliable. The wireless signal was bouncing between 1 and 4 bars. This was inadequate signal strength and bandwidth for the work I would be doing on the internet. To make matters worse, this area has no T-mobile service at all, which is our cell phone carrier. Thus, I could not use turning my cell phone into a personal hotspot as a backup. Worse beyond that, we could not use our cell phones to make or receive calls. T-mobile has the ability to make calls over WiFI if the cell signal is missing or inadequate. But without working WiFi, that was not an option either.
We reported our problem to the front desk and asked if they could bring us a hard wire internet cable, which they did. That wasn't a solution either as after plugging in the hard wire the computer reported that there was no internet on the ethernet hard wire connection.
I took my notebook computer to the breakfast area near the front desk to see if the wireless signal would be better there. In that location, my computer and my cell phone detected a full strength WiFi internet signal. I was able to log on and everything that I use online worked perfectly. We called down to the front desk and asked if we could be moved to another room with working internet. They moved us to the room closest to the breakfast area.
Unfortunately, the signal strength in that room was no better than in our prior room. We asked if we could try some other rooms to try to find one with a working internet signal. The hotel staff said that would not be possible as they have to make up every room that we enter. Not wanting to go hunting for another hotel, I decided to just go do my computer work in a chair in the front lobby where there was a good WiFi signal.
Later in the evening when I returned to my room I found that the internet signal had improved. I worked fairly late into the night while the singal was good in our room.
Unfortunately, the following morning on Wednesday, June 1, the WiFi signal was flakey again. Thus I went down to the main lobby to continue my computer work. While in the lobby someone on the hotel staff was spending a lot of time trying to fix something with the hotel internet. I caught some bits of the conversation between that person and someone he was speaking to on the phone. It seems the hard wire internet in the rooms was mostly daisy chained, including the hot spots around the hotel. This chain was interupted somewhere, hense why there was no working hard wire internet in many of the rooms and why many of the hot spots in the hotel were not working. The staff person mentioned something about jumping the connection to restore internet to some of the hard wired locations and to some of the hot spots around the hotel.
Around noon I returned to our room and found that the WiFi in our room was now working much better. Thus I continued my work in our own room rather than in the lobby.
At about 5 PM I took a break and we decided to get some dinner. We looked at a few of the guides and then called down to the desk to ask where they recommended to eat. They mentioned the Speakeasy Bar & Grill. We looked it up on the web and it looked interesting to us. So we headed out to that restaurant. The Speakeasy Bar & Grill was about 7 miles away but still in the city of Salina, Kansas.
They had over 40 beers on tap including 3 IPA's. My wife and I each had a different IPA which were both good. We liked this restaurant and will probably come again if we return to this own again in the future.
As I mentioned above, not much else to report for today! Check back for the rest of the reports and photos of this Tesla Model X travel report.
Note: This report is a rough draft. I have not yet done a spell check or final edits. Since we are driving this road trip right now, devoting time to driving takes priority. As I get time at our stays along the way I'll make final edits and spelling corrections. But for now, please pardon any errors.
