Ok, I said I'd post after the trip with my experience and upon returning I promptly forgot about that. Trip Report follows:
We ended up getting out on the road earlier than I had thought, and this led to my first mistake. As someone who has traveled south from Maryland all of his life, I know that you never drive south on 95 in Northern Virginia. You go 301. I always go 301 and had said that no matter what, we were going to cut over to 301 because that stretch around Woodbridge is always terrible. Never go south on 95 in Northern Virginia... especially in the afternoon, especially on a Friday afternoon. I are dumb.
We pulled up the trip on the navigation screen and it was green all the way through (even the city!) and my ideas about cutting WAY over to 301 evaporated because "maybe we're ahead of the traffic."
Never go south on 95 in Northern Virginia in the afternoon on a Friday.
We were the traffic. Complicated by the fact that there were a couple accidents on both 95 and Rte 1 it took us several hours more than it needed to for us to get to Glen Allen. Pressing ahead with the plan, despite it being a fairly normal dinner time, we crossed the street after plugging in to get coffee and pick up some provisions for the folks already at the lake. My driving companion asked while we were checking out how much longer the car needed and when I brought up my phone I realized we had WAY more mileage than we needed to get to Rocky Mount.
With some coaxing, I convinced her to take over driving for the next leg of the trip and (after a quick acclimation circuit around the parking lots) we were back on the road. Once she dialed in the TACC for comfortable highway driving it was smooth sailing all the way down to NC. She's probably better with it than I am at this point. I became apparent (according to the Nav) that we'd be hitting Rocky Mount, NC about 30 minutes before the steakhouses (where we had planned to eat dinner) closed. I pulled up the menus and we decided on what sounded tasty.
Having worked in food service for a while, I know the pain of having people slide in right before close and want a full meal. Everyone is doing their closing work, the kitchen sometimes has already been shut down, and it's just not ever going to be the pinnacle of service. To help mitigate this, I called down to the steakhouse to explain the situation. I was assured that the kitchen kept serving food until 11 and as long as we were there before 11 they'd be happy to feed us.
Pressing on, we got into Rocky Mount just before 10:30 and swooped into the mostly empty Texas Roadhouse (which is attached to one of the hotels). I'm pretty sure the hostess I talked to on the phone was happier to accommodate us than the bartender that ended up taking our orders, but there appeared to be a wedding party occupying most of the bar area so I think we were pretty low on the annoying patron scale that night.
Even eating with the fury of two ravenous wildebeests, by the time we got the check and paid, the car again had enough juice to make it to Lumberton. Over text message with the folks already at the lake there was discussion about skipping Lumberton. We decided since this was the first long trip to play it safe (this is funny now) and stop in Lumberton at 1:30am for one last little boost. We got back on the road and headed towards Lumberton, NC with me back at the wheel.
I do not recommend existing in Lumberton, NC at 1:30am. Though there were many large sodium-vapor lights around the Texas Roadhouse and surrounding parking lots there, almost none of them seemed to be functioning. Couple this with everything being closed and us just kinda sitting in the car for a few minutes, this stop was less than fun. Also, we're pretty sure we saw some sort of extra-legal business transaction go down in the lot next to the chargers. The moment we had a comfortable buffer to get to the lake we jetted.
All said, it took us 12 hours to get to the lake which is way more hours than it should have. The reasons were completely because of decisions I made though, and not because of accommodations made for the car. I used both exterior 120V and dryer circuit 240V while at the lake. When we got in, I plugged in outside and we unloaded all of the things. I didn't drive the car again until Sunday when we all piled in to visit my cousins in Wilmington for lunch and by then the car was almost completely full. It was no sweat to make it to Wilmington and drive around for the day. We made it back with plenty left on the battery. In order to leave with a max charge Monday morning, I did some of that math I'm supposed to be so good at and elected to plug into the 240V dryer circuit (requiring my 14-50 to 10-30 adapter) for a couple hours before swapping back over to the 120V in order to have the car reach 100% (well, like 97%) by Monday morning.
The next morning we reset the lake house and packed everything into the cars and set back out. This time we decided to skip Lumberton (although the sneaky GPS still routed us through that town). Right after we set out, our path to 74/76 was blocked by an accident and we ended up taking a dirt road that paralleled it for some miles. Put the suspension up on "high" and the car tackled it with no trouble.
The two cars met up at the Rocky Mount, NC chargers (50ish miles remaining) and we ate the lunch we had packed (which was essentially all the food we didn't eat that weekend). My driving companion swapped over to the other car and we went our separate ways. I ended up sitting with the car longer than I needed to because I was chatting on IRC and lost track of time. I set back out on the road, now alone, with my sights on Glen Allen.
I got to Glen Allen with around 70 miles on the battery and plugged in. I decided to grab a coffee at the Panera and relax for a bit. Again, I overcharged at this stop. Partially because the coffee I purchased was McDonald's lawsuit levels of hot and partially because once I got back to the car, another Tesla owner (I'm sorry I've forgotten your name now, I'm terrible at names... your shirt matched your vanity plate though) and we chatted for a bit.
This time, especially since my house is further east than where my friend was coming from, I made sure to take 301. Much nicer ride back, even with the stop lights. I got home with around 100mi on the battery and pretty much didn't leave the couch until morning. Trip back took a little over 9 hours.
I hope that there might be some nuggets of useful information in the above rambling that people can leverage for future trips.
)
