Wednesday, March 6th.   We are still recovering from last night’s zero mile on the batter scare, feeling quite fortunate we avoided disaster.   The Howard Johnson is good for a free breakfast in the lobby and we move on.  This leg is relatively short and we make the trip on a single charge.  Initially, we hope on grabbing a short charge in Oklahoma City over a second breakfast, but it is not meant to be.  The only public EV chargers we can find in downtown Oklahoma City are in front of the Music Hall, and most unfortunately the street where the chargers are located were full of road construction vehicles.  The concrete trucks are about to arrive and pour concrete.  The chargers are accessible, but parking there will be at our risk and I am not about to let a concrete truck  or backhoe accidentally crunch the car.    Our noon+ start from El Reno causes us to arrive to Dallas in the late afternoon. We nail an excellent hotel on Priceline.  You can’t beat a Hyatt Place for $49 per night.   The room is huge, with a large living room area complete with wrap around sofa.   More precisely, we were in Garland a NW suburb of Dallas.

The closest charger is in downtown, Garland about 4.5 miles from the hotel and we head over there after dinner to bed the Tesla down for the night.  The first two Blink chargers  in front of City Hall are not working.  Each of the units keeps posting fault codes.  There’s a reset feature on the Blink chargers when fault codes occur, but this does not work to correct the problem.  Another issue with the Blink chargers- many of them reboot at midnight.  The rebooting may cause the charging to stop.  This is not a reassuring thought when your hotel is almost 5 miles away from the charger.   The Blink customer service line staffers whom we get over the phone are very courteous and helpful, but they are not able to help us to fix the chargers.  We stike out and have to go elsewhere.  The staffer explains they are working on software upgrades to overcome the nightly software reboot, so that a vehicle will continue to recharge through the night.

We move on to another set of Blink chargers a few blocks away,  in another city parking lot, in front of the Police Boxing Gym.  Fortunately, these Blink chargers work.  We arrive slightly before midnight.  This charger appears not reboot at midnight even though a notice warns us of the reboot.  These chargers as well as the City Hall chargers turn out to be free, but we still need to log onto Blink’s website, enter credit card information in order to generate a free Blink access guest code.  It’s a headache, but we’ve gotten use to it.  Each code can only be used once.  Better to have a valid Blink account with the access card.  Mine is probably sitting with my mail, back in Miami Beach.

We’re in Dallas from Wednesday to Saturday morning.  I have some business appointments set up and we make plans to drag race the car Friday night at the Dallas Raceway in Crandall, TX (southwest of Dallas).  A friend of mine, Danny in Dallas has a 2013 Maserati GranCabio Sport.  It’s a beautiful car and packs a Ferrari V8 with 460HP.   We make our best attempt to persuade him to meet us at the race track Friday night.  Sadly, our grudge match is not meant to be.  Friday afternoon it begins to drizzle for a few hours and both the Dallas Raceway and Texas MotorPlex cancel their Friday night Tune & Test 1/4 mile drag night.   We are totally bummed out over this and disappointingly leave Dallas early Saturday morning for Houston.  Hopefully, somewhere along our Easterly route to Miami, FL, we will be able to find a nice drag race track.