Fall Trip 2024 Day 9

30 September 2024

Still on the backroads, first from my hotel in Logansport IN where I couldn’t charge my car to an Electrify America near Fort Wayne, then to Arbor Brewing Company in Ypsilanti MI, and finally a few more miles to my hotel in Ann Arbor. My route was the dark blue line on the map:

The EA location was another set of six new and reliable chargers located at a Meijer store (with a set of Tesla superchargers right next to them). Two of the six chargers were even situated for access by EVs with a trailer in tow, a very unusual situation in my limited experience. I love these newer chargers — I’ve never had an issue starting a session (although I did see one charger out of service at the first Meijer I stopped at a few days ago) and have always gotten decent speeds from them, usually with the peak at or near the vehicle’s max charging speed. I went from 17-80% in just over 16 minutes.

Meijer stores are also a good place to spend a few minutes while the car is topping off — the bathrooms are usually far cleaner than you’ll find at a rest area and the grocery side of the store has just about any snack you’d like.

I pulled into my hotel’s parking lot to find two EV chargers. For some odd reason, the spots aren’t marked for EV Only Parking so one of them was taken by a huge Jeep from Ohio. I maneuvered my way into the other spot — the Jeep driver was spectacularly bad at parking — and plugged in. Hooray once again for free charging at the hotel! I’m here for 3 nights so I’m just going from 32-80% this evening so there won’t be an issue with whatever driving I might decide to do tomorrow, and I’ll go to 100% tomorrow evening as I’m heading to East Lansing on Wednesday to spend an hour with a grad school friend. Wednesday evening will be another 100% charge and I leave Thursday.

The drive today was mostly relaxing. There was just one section where I was in a line of cars stuck behind a very heavy, slow truck for about 10 miles. Eventually, there was a passing lane and we were back up to speed. I don’t have any photos from today; it never rained but it certainly was a gray day with low clouds. I probably should have stopped for a photo of Downtown Hicksville, though — it’s not every day you find a town with a name like that!