Salem, OR to Grants Pass, OR – 201 miles

It’s Friday, Feb. 22nd and time to pick the car up from the Mission Mills Museum.  I jog over to retrieve the car and return to our motel to pack the car.  Our battery pack is around an hour short of a full charge so we don’t expect to be breaking any distance records today.   We leave Salem, headed South on the I5 arriving into Eugene for lunch.   We scout out an EV charger at a local Walgreen’s, right next to a bunch of dining choices.  Pulling into Walgreen’s the non-EV car in front of us grabs the EV parking space, so we start honking the horn, Juan get’s out to politely explain we need the spot to charge our EV car.  The woman sheepishly puts it in reverse to move to another spot.   Fortunately, we didn’t arrive a moment later, or we would have been stuck waiting.   It’s starting to become a recurring nuisance, arriving to an EV charger parking spot only to find it occupied by very inconsiderate combustion engine car drivers.

I’ve probably mentioned it a few times already, our basic plan for road tripping, Eat a meal – charge the car.  We settle on BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse.  I believe they recently opened one down in Miami by the International Mall.  I’m curious about the place so Juan agrees to give it a try.   An 80 minutes pass until we return to the car and we’ve gained 30 miles onto the battery, which should help a lot, since we failed to fully charge the night before.

We continue South on I5 targeting Grants Pass as a good spot to stay for the night.  The route climbs a number of mountains, so for the day it looks like we are only going 201 miles.   We have a lot left on the battery, but we got a late start and Grant Pass seems like a good junction point before heading West towards the Coast.  They are several  EVchargers showing on our data bases and lots of hotel choices.   First stop is right off I5 at a local chamber of commerce with a charger out front.  The charger is part of the EVNet, new to us.  The facility has both a Level 2 and a CHAdeMO DC charger.  Sadly, the Level 2 charger is not work for us and appears to be offline.  We contact the toll-free customer service department  but they fail to resolve the issue, and they mention something about needing to send out a service tech next week to troubleshoot and fix the communications issue.  We are bummed out.  A bunch of hotels are within walking distance.

Onward, across to the other side of town we scout out the next closest available charger, at a Walgreen’s.   The only other charger in town is located at a car dealer and it’s night available overnight.   Unfortunately, our hotel is back clear on the opposite side of town.  We make a plan and drop off our luggage at the hotel first. Juan is nice enough to drive the car back to Walgreen’s, leave it charging for the night and run back to the hotel for a 2+ mile jog.   Later, that evening I discover an RV park right next to the hotel.  Talk about 20/20 hindsight!!  We could have charged the car at this RV park.    At least the Walgreen’s charger is free and Juan gets some exercise.   I think it’s awesome Walgreen’s has all these free EV chargers on the West Coast.   This is our first overnight charge at a Walgreen’s and fortunately for us, it appears the Walgreen’s EV chargers don’t get turned off at night.

Waking up the next monring well rested at La Quinta Inn, Juan is nice enough to run 3M over to retrieve our car.  I scout out the RV park next door to the hotel, to check out the 240V 50Ah Nema 14-50 plug outlets available at the park.  I want to see first-hand what I hope we will soon get to use to charge our Tesla.   Up to this point in the trip we have not needed to take our charging cable out of the trunk.   Before leaving Grants Pass, we pull into a car wash to give the Tesla a nice bath.

This EV charger in Grants Pass at the local chamber of commerce wouldn’t work. The bigger unit is a CHAdaMO charger so we are out of luck.

Saved by Walgreen’s We leave the car overnight at this Walgreen’s to charge the Tesla. Hopefully, the charger won’t shut down at closing.  This car is getting dirty.  That’s a dirt streak from Whistler on the rear quarter panel.  Looks like we scraped the body against an immovable object, but it’s just dirt.

Time to give this Tesla a good scrub down.   Nice vacuum job on the carpet first, then those gorgeous 21″ grey wheels…