Las Vegas, Kingman AZ, to Grand Canyon, AZ – 277 miles.

Saturday morning, March 2nd, we leave Las Vegas in route to the Grand Canyon.   Driving down highway 93, we pass through Henderson, Boulder City and the Lake Mead National Recreation Center, missing Hoover Dam.  Stopping at a nice vista point we encounter some Indians selling jewelry and pottery.  I negotiate to purchase two small pots for $40 each and a necklace.  Little do I know I’m getting ripped off and paying double what their worth, Lol.

East of Las Vegas for the next few days,  we don’t expect to encounter many or any EV chargers, so we start scouting the RV parks for our charging encounters.   We have some difficulty finding an RV park willing to allow us to charge the car.   By phone, several locations in Kingman turn us away, with excuses like; we don’t know how much to charge you, or we will have to contact the manager, or we don’t have space.  It’s early in the year, and it’s still low season for most of these places.  One park we stop by is willing, but does not have any 220V connections.

We finally locate a suitable park at the local Sunrise RV park stopping for 2 hours (@ 240V 50AH) and grabbing lunch a a local diner.   Kay the manager on staff will charge us a fair rate of $10.  She charges $15 for overnight charging and commented about another Tesla which charges periodically in her park.  It’s a quiet and peaceful place like most RV parks and it does the job efficiently.

We added enough juice to arrive in the late evening to Grand Canyon park, Maswik Lodge with the plan to charge the Tesla at the nearby RV trailer park about 2 miles from the lodge.  First we register at the hotel, drop the bags in the room, have dinner then make our plan to drop off the car to charge for the night.   This night we called a local taxi which arrived to the Trailer park within minutes to take us back to the lodge.  The roads in the park are pitch black at night, we had no flashlights, some people mentioned bears and we risked getting lost if we proceeded on foot.   This is the forth RV park we are using to charge.  The RV parks are a better source for power than EV chargers, because they charge the car up to 75% faster.  RV parks seem to have higher voltages, up to 240V and 50Ah.   The EV charger voltages have varied a lot, between 196V to 240V.  When it outputs at 196V and 28A the car is only charging at around 15 mph.