For the first time since I started in Kaukauna 30+ years ago, we have a week-long Spring Break. Well, technically we had one in 2020, but COVID interfered with that. Diana and I both took this week off to decompress a little. We decided that we wanted to go somewhere, but to stay as safe as possible since her mom still lives with us and is very high risk. I also wanted to take my electric car to see how it does on road trips.
We settled on Indianapolis. We’ve never been there before, it was 8 hours away or less, and it was south, so we were hoping for warm weather. We took our time, charging in Milwaukee, Chicago (north and south side), Lafayette, and Indianapolis on the way down.
We visited museums on Sunday, which was a very good choice because we nearly had them to ourselves. First off was the Indiana State Museum, followed by the Eiteljorg Museum of Native and Western Art. Then we walked down the Canal Walk. It was cold, with temps in the low 50s.
Monday was a much nicer day, reaching nearly 70 degrees. We took a drive to Uranus Fudge Factory (yes, they’re aware of what it sounds like and really lean into the name), followed by a shopping trip to IKEA. We then walked outdoors for quite a bit, enjoying the little shopping and food area outside of the Hyatt House.
The drive home was very cloudy, then heavy storms hit around Racine. The car handled really well. A few things I learned about traveling with an EV: you have to be patient, and add about 20% more time to your trip to account for not only longer charging time but the time getting to/from the chargers from the highway, since they’re not easy to access or ubiquitous like gas stations. You have to plan ahead, and have a backup plan in case a charging station is out. The cost of fast charging, even if I had paid full price, is still half the cost of driving a gas vehicle that gets 30 MPG. I was able to use free charging from Electrify America that came with my car. We made charging part of the destination, stopping at Walmart, Target, Meijer, and even a shopping mall that had charging stations. I feel much more comfortable taking an EV road trip now than I did before this week.
