Fall Trip 2024 Day 5

26 September 2024

Today was a long drive but enjoyable, sticking to secondary roads the entire time for the relaxation rather than save a couple of hours going by interstate. In fact, that’s my plan for the rest of this trip unless I get tired of the drive and hop on an interstate to get somewhere faster. Actual miles driven were 316, one less than the reconstructed route above shows (because I’m not 100% sure exactly which roads I was on part of the day). I spent as much of the day as possible at 55-60 mph but a lot of the time was slower than that, resulting in 4.2 miles/kWh for today and bringing my trip total to 1,117 miles and 3.8 miles/kWh.

I didn’t get out much while I was in Columbus the last two days; it rained on and off and the sky was constant, low, dark gray clouds. This was the view out my hotel room window yesterday afternoon when it seemed the sun might win out after all (it didn’t!):

This morning was more of the same, only quite dismal, and I drove with my headlights on for a couple of hours until the sky began to lighten. Just as I crossed into Indiana, blue skies came into view and stayed with me the rest of the day. There was also a large Red Tail Hawk perched next to the road to welcome me to a new state!

Along the way, I passed through Lebanon and Palestine and two Covingtons as well as numerous other towns, both small and medium-sized. It’s always interesting to see what they look like. The very tiniest are usually identifiable only by the grain elevator; the larger ones can have really fascinating downtown architecture. Sometimes I wish I could bring myself to take a break and get photos, but I’m usually too focused on arriving at my destination.

Since I started the day with the battery at 100%, I only needed to stop once. This was another free session at an Electrify America and I’m charging for free again tonight at the hotel, so this trip has cost me nothing for electricity so far. Even my Sonata Hybrid with its great gas mileage would have cost me at least $75 by this point. The mid-day charging session was 9 minutes, going from 43% to 70%. I didn’t need to go higher and would actually have been fine with 60% but better safe than sorry 🙂

Tomorrow will be a somewhat shorter day, probably a total of 6 hours including one short charging session along the way.

At the end of the day, I had this view out my hotel room window, pretty typical for this part of the country: