April 2024 Road Trip, Day 5

6 April 2024

I didn’t post anything yesterday because there really wasn’t much to say. I did drive down to Cincinnati to visit Jungle Jim’s International Market, but the weather wasn’t conducive to my other two planned stops at Loveland Castle and the Deer Creek State Park Archery Range. While Columbus was mostly staying dry, the Cincinnati area was getting rained on periodically.

The car turned in 3.1 miles/kWh on the drive there on the interstate; I chose secondary roads on the return trip and got 3.5 miles/kWh, showing how speed negatively impacts the energy usage. I recharged at Electrify America Harpers Station near Cincinnati, a location I’d been warned was problematic. As expected, a few of the 8 chargers were in use, and of the others, one had a blank screen, two appeared to be working but refused to start a charging session, and one finally gave me what I wanted, albeit at only 104kW on a 150kW charger.

Today consisted of just a few short trips not going far from my hotel. The most interesting one from an efficiency point of view was a 3-mile trip first thing in the morning that was mostly uphill and while the heat pump was working to warm up the car’s interior — that resulted in 2.3 miles/kWh. The return trip, about 20 minutes later, was mostly downhill and was well over 4 miles/kWh.

At the end of the day, my overall efficiency for the entire trip clicked up a tenth of a mile:

Earlier today, I did take advantage of a trail that runs not far from my hotel. One of the things I love about the Columbus metropolitan area is the vast array of parks and trails — there are 230 miles of trails in all in the Metro Parks system! I walked part of the Alum Creek Trail, although I did run into a still-flooded area not too far north of the hotel. Here are some photos from my 1.5-mile walk:

Archery will have to wait until a future trip when things aren’t so wet here.