Nora and I did it. We went to Texas and did the things.
“What things?” I hear you asking. We ran the first half marathon of the year. We saw not one but two Celtics games, one in Houston and the other in Dallas. We had dinner with Nora’s running coach. We rented an EV for our travel around the giant state.
It was all good, except maybe the EV.
Let’s start with the race. Nora PR’d yet again. She is doing amazing with her running this past year. I, too, performed well, I PR’d for “the modern era”, which makes it the second fastest half I have run. The course was a fair bit downhill, so we had that working for us. I’d had a semi-serious goal of beating my pace from the Richmond half, which was about 9:45/mile. Somewhere along the way, I realized I was close to coming in at under two hours for the whole race.
Opinions (and by opinions, I mean the various timers who kept track of my progress) vary, but I was somewhere in the two-hour range. The official pace I am going with is 9:11/mile. I am quite pleased with this. And this has got me thinking about if I could actually beat my pace of 8:25/mile set back in 2014. Mmmmmmaybe.
Dinner with CC was nice, though a bit of a struggle to find somewhere we could get a table.
The Celtics won both of their games!
Let’s see…oh, right…the EV. What an unmitigated disaster that was.
Nora had reserved a Tesla with a 300+ mile range for us. They did not have a Tesla for us. (Insert Jerry Seinfeld bit here) We were given the choice of three different EVs, and our unified response was, “Give us the one that has the best range.”
“Well, that’s the Ford,” the man behind the counter said. So we took it.
We popped in the car, and it was fully charged! Woohoo! Range? 187 miles. Umm, what?!?!
It was 200 miles to our destination, oh no. I forgot to mention that we had a hard cutoff time for picking up our race bibs, but we had almost two hours to spare. Off we went. Shortly into the drive I saw the first sign for a Buc-ees, it was something like 120 miles away. We did a quick check, and sure enough, Buc-ees has charging stations at their locations.
As we were going, I kept a close eye on the remaining range and felt good about our situation. We arrived with about 50 miles left in the “tank.”
Wait, what’s this? Only Tesla chargers are on location. Uh-oh. Well, surely the rental car company thought of this and prepared for their customers by providing an adapter, right? Uh, no. No, they did not. We did have an AC plug, though.
Back to the internet to find somewhere we could charge up. We learned a lot (A LOT) about the different kinds and powers of chargers. We found one location along our route fifty miles away, and one about thirty-five miles back the way we had come. Moving along the road seemed too dicey, so we were forced to backtrack. Keep in mind our time constraints.
We made it to the charging location about forty minutes later. FIgured out how to pay and hooked up. Then came the math game. While charging, the display will show you the estimated range based on the charge level. I took out my slide rule and did the calculating that we needed to get to the 150-mile range to confidently get to packet pick-up and still have enough charge left to find the next place to plug in.
It wasn’t long into the charging that we started to wonder if we would have enough time to get to that level and make it to pick-up before they shut down. We could go longer on the charger to get the range and make up the time with a faster driving speed, but we weren’t sure what that would do to our estimated range. Oh boy.
In the end, we were able to get to an eighty percent charge and hit the road. We made it to the race expo with fifteen minutes and twenty miles to spare.
I wish I could say that this was the only time we ran into this issue, but I can’t. Between the distances we had to travel, the speed of the chargers we found, and even the reliability of the chargers we found, the whole long weekend was about charging that damn car. Everything revolved around it. Where we parked, Where we ate. Where we peed. EVERYTHING!
I don’t share this to disparage EVs. The driving experience was quite nice. Just this car on this trip, with the distances we had to travel. It didn’t work. This trip marked the first time I can recall Nora and I being cranky at the same time. Usually, one of us balances out the other when in stressful situations.
I’m glad to say we made it through, and, if anything, I have a greater appreciation for Nora from it.