Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Destination #2 Old Orchard Beach, Maine

I had a great time seeing everyone in the Buffalo area, love you Grace, Tom, Gordon, Dan and Traci! Shout out to Chris and Red, it was nice to meet you and I now have a new show I need to watch. LOL

The drive from Buffalo to Old Orchard Beach Maine was a great one, I stopped once in Syracuse, NY (think it was actually Lockport) and once in Lee, Mass. The Lockport charger was just off the highway at the Holiday Inn. The convention Center doors were unlocked so I was able to use the restroom, then I read a little bit of my book while I waited for the car to charge. Overall I was there for about 30 minutes.  I was the only car using the charge stop so I got full juice from the station. The entrance back onto the highway was right there at the stoplight to leave the parking lot, so this was a very easy stop to make. Actually easier than it would have been to go to a gas station up the road.

The charger at Lee, Mass has one nose-in spot which was great, I LOVE those spots! It was at a grocery store so I was able to grab some lunch and eat while I charged. I also took a short nap here b/c it was going to be a long session, about 50 minutes. I did have a friend when I woke up from my nap, a model S was parked a few spots away.  I had some friends at the Buffalo charger as well, there were three of us there so I thought two had to share the charge regardless. I was thankfully wrong about how the charge sharing worked though so we were all good. :-)



The weather was great and I made really good time on this part of the trip until I got to Boston. Traffic in Boston was atrocious. I was doing 17 mph in a 55 mph zone, and that was my top speed. It was mostly start & stop for an hour going around the city. On the plus side, this was the least stressful rush hour traffic/massive traffic jam I have ever been in thanks to Nik doing all the driving for me. Yay for autopilot! It did an excellent job of maintaining not only my position in traffic, but also my sanity. LOL It was really nice to not have to worry about gas/brake/gas/brake constantly and it handled it like a champ when people cut in between me and the car in front of me (I had my distance set at 7 seconds, I did actually end up making it 4 seconds for this part of the drive to keep the cut-ins from happening constantly).



I made it all the way to the house in Old Orchard Beach without having to charge again, despite being behind a car accident at one other point in addition to the Boston traffic delay. My friend (hey Shamus) met me in the driveway, helped unload the car, and got me plugged into his 10-30 wall outlet in the garage via an adapter. We dialed down the charge to 24 amps and let it go (if you don't manually dial it down you can start a fire since it is a non-tesla adapter b/c the car still thinks it is on a 14-50).  Charging this way was a bit slower than my home charger because of the lower power of the outlet, but we still charged up in about 8 hours, so overnight. I spent a couple of days of beach and games with my friend here in OOB (it really is a nice beach) and had a great relaxing time, all rested up to head out on the road again.  In the meantime, enjoy the beach!




1 comment:

  1. The stall numbers are paired, so if you see somebody in 1A, 1B will get less power until 1A is done charging. Best option is to pick a stall where both numbers are open. Good luck with the rest of your trip!

    ReplyDelete

Home, final numbers

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