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 12, a day we spent in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
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.
Most of today was spent writing and posting this Tesla travel report from the last couple of days plus getting some of my usual computer work done. I love the Residence Inn by Marriott as they have huge spacious rooms with a full kitchen. But what I like most about this hotel brand is that they offer a separate work desk in addition to a kitchen table, and they have excellent internet with the option to use either WiFi or wired internet or both (and they even provide the wire!).
For my main notebook computer, I chose to use the wired connection. This paricular Residence Inn limits you to 3 connected devices per room. Any extra devices require extra payment. Figuring my main notebook could use a boosted internet speed more than the others, I attempted to purchase the extra speed option for it for just $4.95 per day. Unfortunately, the option to purchase premium internet didn't seem to be working. It kept kicking me back to the screen where you choose between free or paid internet or to log on with an access code.
I don't know if my wife and I are unusual, but we seem to need more internet connections than just 3 when we travel. We each have our own notebook computer, so there goes 2 right there. We each have a smart phone, so there goes 2 more. Our smart phone network carrier is T-mobile. That carrier works fine just about everywere we normally go both in our home town of Vancouver, Washington, and our vacation house in Anaheim, California, plus most of the places we travel. But when we are out on the open road, it doesn't do anywhere near as well as Verizon or even AT&T. We seem to be able to make calls on our smart phones just about everywhere, but the cellular internet on our smart phones is a problem. A small amount of "roaming" internet is included each month that allows us to use cellular internet over carriers other than T-mobile. But, I'm a pretty heavy smart phone internet user, especially with uploading all my photos on these travels. So I run out of that "roaming" cellular internet pretty quickly. My wife's cellular internet allocation seems to run for many more days than mine. Thus, we really do need to connect our smart phones to WiFi whenever that is available. Beyond those 4 devices I also have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 tablet that needs a WiFi connection for most of its functions. And last, I almost always use a second smaller notebook PC which really helps when writing these repors. I can be viewing the photos on one screen while typing my report on the other screen. Thus, we really like to have the ability to connect 6 devices whenever we stay at a hotel!
When we reported the problem to the front desk that we were not able to purchase premium internet access, they instead gave us an access code to use. That access code worked fine on all of our devices for the rest of the hotel stay and we didn't need to purchase any additional or premium internet access. I'm not sure if the access code gave us regular or premium speed, but everything seemed to work fine for our entire stay.
Last night we departed Zannotti's Wine Bar with 78 miles of charge remaining on the battery. I didn't track how much of that we used driving from the wine bar to the hotel, but it wasn't much as the hotel was just a couple of miles away. Today we decided to go to a nearby Italian restaurant for dinner. Since the nearest Tesla Supercharger is 25 miles away in Perry, Oklahoma, we were hoping to keep 50 miles of charge remaining on the battery just as a safety margin. However, there was an unexpected detour on the way to the restaurant that took us down miles and miles of unpaved roads! I put the Tesla suspension on "very high" to handle these gravel roads better and reduced my speed to almost a crawl. It seemed like this detour took us miles out of our way. By the time we reached the restaurant we only had 60 miles of charge remaining on the battery.
That was less than the safety margin of charge that I would have liked. I checked the "Charge Point" and "Plug Share" offerings to see if there was anywhere nearby that I could add just a bit more safety margin of charge to the battery. There was nothing other than one person listed who offered to share his 110v home outlet with EV owners! That is something I would only consider if this was a real emergency, and it wasn't. Heck, I'm sure the hotel would let me plug into a 220v or 110v there if I got really desperate. But 60 miles of charge seemed still plenty to get back to the hotel and then drive the 25 miles to the Tesla Supercharger in Perry in the morning.
The food and the wine at this restaurant were excellent. The restaurant was in a shopping complex with many other national chain restaurants including The Olive Garden. My wife and I always prefer to try unique one of a kind local restaurants rather than to frequent the big chain restaurants. But if you like chain restaurants, they seem to have one of every major national chain restaurant in Stillwater, Oklahoma! There are a lot more restaurants and hotels in Stillwater than in Perry, Oklahoma, where the Tesla Supercharger is located. But I can see why Tesla put it in Perry rather than Stillwater. In Perry, the Supercharger is right at the exit and there are a couple of places to eat and a convenience store right by the charger. At the Stillwater exit off I-35 there is absolutely nothing! You have to drive 12 miles after exiting the interstate to get to Downtown Stillwater.
Again there was another detour trying to get from the restaurant back to our hotel. Fortunately, the detour did not send us down any unpaved roads this time. Also, the detour sent us down a road that pretty much was just parallel to the normal route so didn't add much distance to the route we would normally have taken.
We did one more check to see how far we'd have to drive in the morning to get from the hotel back to the Tesla Supercharger in Perry, Oklahoma. As you can see above, it would be about 25 miles and we still had 52 miles of charge remaining on the battery. That was plenty of safety margin (assuming there would not be any more lengthy detours). Actually, this return route back to Perry was a lot more easy highway and interstate driving than the route the GPS had sent us to get from Perry to Stillwater. But actually, that back route wasn't bad and had sent us through the center of town so that we got to see a lot more of Stillwater, Oklahoma.
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.
