Fall Trip 2025 Day 5

17 September 2025

Today started off in Bettendorf IA with sunny skies, a light breeze, and 65º when I left the hotel at 8:45am. By the time I arrived in Rochester MN around 2pm, it was in the low 80s with full clouds, and I’d driven through some heavy rains on the way. Before leaving, though, I did visit a donut shop just a 2-minute walk from my hotel and I’ve never seen such variety! There were dozens of different kinds to choose from including apple fritters and cinnamon buns that were each nearly the size of dinner plates. They had this great truck parked in the lot:

Because I’d been able to charge to 100% yesterday afternoon, my plan for today was to drive 234 miles straight through on back roads to Stewartville MN, just south of Rochester, and charge for free at an Electrify America with six 350kW chargers. What could go wrong?

Along the way, I was reminded of how every small town in Iowa has a speed limit of 20mph through the downtown area, and that holds true even for downtowns that look like this one in Delmar:

See those blue skies with just a hint of clouds in the photo above? Just an hour later, this is what I was driving into and the first BIG rain drops hit the windshield just a minute later (I swear it actually looked blacker than this in real life):

I was in moderate to heavy rain for almost a half hour with standing water on the road in some areas because it had been raining that hard. Needless to say, I was happy to see dry pavement again.

When I found the chargers, I plugged into one and pulled up the app to start the charging session. This seemed like a reasonable thing to do as last evening I’d checked and the EA app had showed all 6 chargers in service. Naturally, the one I picked was now out of service in spite of the screen looking OK. In fact, THREE were out of service so I repositioned to one that was working, got everything started, and went into the nearby store to use the restroom.

As I got back to my car and was checking on the progress, a Rivian pulled into one of the chargers and fortunately had picked a good one — he was able to start the session without problem just as my session ended early “due to a technical fault.” I unplugged and replugged and restarted and everything continued as normal. In the end, I went from 17-80% in 15 minutes, not counting the futzing around, which is really great.

During the second part of my session, another Rivian pulled in — the same color as the first but with different wheels — and of course he tried to use the first charger that I’d tried. We talked for a bit and he said he uses this location a lot because he drives about 2,500 miles a month and this is the first time he’s had an issue here. He also said he was a bit envious of my car because of the charging speed (made possible by the 800V battery architecture).

From here, it was about a 20 minute drive to the brewpub and another 10 minutes to my hotel. I have 76% charge left tonight which will be more than enough to get me to my charging stop tomorrow in Prairie du Chien WI. The car did 3.8 miles/kWh for today’s 250 miles, and here’s where I am on my trip. Tomorrow begins my drive back to Massachusetts, although it won’t be a direct route so I’m actually less than half way by miles driven, and I’ll continue on back roads exclusively until Day 15 when I’ll spend my final two days on interstates.