Seattle, WA to Salem, OR – 220 miles

Thursday, Feb. 21st.  Another day another leg.  While in Seattle, we breakfast at French bakery, Le Panier on Pike Place as our last visit.  It’s pretty touristy here, but the pastries and breads are fantastic, so sit for breakfast then buy some treats for the road.  Earlier, while at the hotel, I’ve contacted the Tesla Service Center at the factory to confirm our pending visit the following week.   The Service Center at the factory is their largest service facility and on that day we will also take a tour of the factory while they are checking over our car.  Here in Seattle, I’ve scheduled a morning business appointment with a watch battery customer.  At noon, we set out for Portland with plans to continue further.   The drive to Portland passes quickly and once again we arrive once to the Portland’s, downtown Electric Ave to recharge andgrab a late lunch & local brewed beers at Hot Lips Pizza, a popular university hangout.  Both the pizza and beer are excellent and I highly recommend the place.

We’ve set our sights on Salem, OR  and we only have a partial charge on the battery.   During our stop, I don’t believe we have added more than 20 miles to our range. Bummer we can’t connect to the CHAdaMO high rate chargers on Electric Ave.   Arriving quite late to Salem we have difficulty finding a charger.   We must have driven the car at a too high a cruising speed because our range is now at less than 20 miles.    In downtown Salem we fail to locate the charger at the Salem Convention Center we had hoped to connect to  for the night.  We still don’t have a hotel either.  There’s an EV charger in a public covered lot across from the convention center, but it appears to be a private network and the locked breaker box is turned off.

We briefly connect at a Walgreen’s EV charger and we take 15 minutes to find a reasonable priced hotel in another part of town.   The best option probably would have been to leave the car charging at the Walgreen’s, but the surrounding neighborhood was a bit sketchy.  Hindsight is 20/20.    We book a room at the local Howard Johnson Inn- somewhat near the airport.  There is suppose to be a charger around 2 miles away.   We neglect to drop the bags at the hotel and set out at 11:50pm to look for the Blink EV charger at the Oregon DOT out by the airport.  We’ve now burned up our reserves and we’re down to 10 miles or less on the battery pack.   It’s late, it’s cold out and we are very tired.   Then the unexpected, the charger doesn’t  work for us.  We call up Blink customer service and they explain it is a fleet charger and only for use with ODOT vehicles.  There’s no way to use this charger and the other two chargers in the neighborhood also belong to the ODOT.  Now, down to around 7 miles on our battery and cold temperatures, of 35 deg. Fahr.  We locate another Blink EV charger over at the Mission Mill Museum parking lot.   Fortunately, it appears to be even closer to the hotel and I’m quite not sure why we don’t notice it in the first place.  ODOT was further from the motel.    We don’t have an active Blink account, so I use my laptop to acquire a Blink guest code in order to use the charger at a rate of $2.00 per hour.   We are quite worn out at this point and not in using our best judgement.  We’re not exactly sure how for the hotel is, so we call a cab, which arrives quickly, pile in the luggage and proceed to the motel to catch some ZZZZ.   I’m not sure why we ran into range issues on this leg.  We must have started out from Seattle without a full charge, thinking we would recharge in Portland, but in Portland we only added a small charge to the battery pack.  When we plugged in at the Mission Mill Museum we were running on fumes with just 4 miles left on the pack.

Seattle, looking towards the bay.

Back in Portland for an early dinner at Hot Lips Pizza and a quick charge at Electric Ave.

How awesome is this vegetarian pizza from Hot Lips Pizza in downtown Portland. I highly recommend this place. Great brewski selection too.

Early evening, riding South on I-5 from Portland to Salem in good company. Passing a truck full of Optima car batteries. Too bad he has to pay for diesel fuel. With a trailer of batteries like that on our hitch, we would probably make it around the globe on one charge.