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electrical roadtrip west of the Blue Ridge
Saturday, July 24 2021
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Today I would be setting out on my own for Staunton, Virginia in the Chevy Bolt. But before I left, Gretchen and I got up late and had our usual Saturday morning experience out on the east deck, complete with croissant bread, coffee, and the letters for the day's New York Times Spelling Bee written on a whiteboard. The panagram was "continuum" (with "i" in the middle) which Gretchen figured out after we'd already made it to genius. She gave me the hint that it had an unusual repetition of letters, and from there I was able to figure it out for myself.
After packing all the things I would need (including my laptop, the electric scooter, the charger for the electric scooter, and various drugs I would be medicating myself with: cannabis, kratom, diphenhydramine, pseudoephedrine, and beer), I started my long drive southwestward. Yesterday I'd discovered that I could play MP3s from a thumbdrive inserted into one of the Bolt's USB ports, so I even had a soundtrack of things to listen to (Car Seat Headrests, the Gathering, and a few songs from Pearl Jam's first album, which gives me positive nostalgia from the pregnant early 1990s).
My first destination was a set of Electrify America fast-chargers in a Walmart parking lot in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, which is just across the Delaware River on I-80. In an effort to maximize my range, I was driving more slowly than usual, rarely exceeding 70 mph and often driving below the 65 mph speed limit, choosing to follow whatever vehicle was in front of me in the right lane (usually a truck) and rarely passing.
After I'd parked at the charger, the urgent need to urinate added a frantic quality to my attempt to start a charging session. I'd already signed up for Electrify America's $4/month plan, which would give me a 24% discount on my fast charges, but for some reason when I pressed my new phone to the NFC ("Near Field Connection") pad on the charger, I was told that I had no account. That's not something you want to learn when you're already doing a pee-pee dance and have already lost a few drops of urine into your shorts. So I was forced to call the toll-free number, where a real human being was able to initiate the charging session remotely. She also fixed whatever was wrong with my account that was causing it not to be recognized by the charger. With that charging away, I could then go into the Walmart to make use of the restroom and make some purchases.
Being a member of the remote-working coastal elite, I'm not too familiar with Walmarts (I've only been into the one in Kingston a handful of times) and how their customers reflect the population of the surrounding locale. The demographic using this Walmart was more African-American (50% or so) than I would've expected so far from a large urban area, and the other half looked to be working-class white people, many of them grotesquely overweight and wearing extreme loungewear like pajama bottoms and slippers, like something out of Idiocracy. I also saw a heavily-tattooed woman who looked to be in her 60s. About half the people, if not more, were wearing face masks, which is more than are wearing them in heavily-vaccinated Ulster County. I have a feeling vaccination is less of a thing in the upper Delaware Valley, and people are still doing the mask thing.
My first goal in the Walmart was to get some obligatory scuff-and-fall protection for my new smartphone, which saw me burning up a lot of the charging time just waiting in line back in the electronics section (that was where I noticed how super-casual the clothing of many of the customers was). Once I had that (it cost a third the price of the phone it would be protecting!), I went to the personal hygeine section to get more diphenhydramine and antacids (though I've been fairly successful at training my stomach not to need them).
Out at the chargers, there were two vehicles charging that hadn't been there before. One was another Bolt driven by an older tie-dye looking gentleman who looked like the sort you wouldn't normally see in Walmart, and other was a Volkswagen of some sort whose driver closed the door, put the seat back, and went to sleep. I suppose that's one way to pass the time while charging.
But the truth of the matter is that charging happens fairly quickly, at least for the first two-thirds of battery capacity. One also has to be on-the-ball about it; if one stays past the charging period and a ten-minute grace period, Electrify America charges $0.40/minute just for occupying the parking space. This is great, because it makes sure that there are almost always chargers available.
My next destination was a set of fast chargers at a Sheetz gas station in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I was even more conservative in my driving on this leg than I had been on the previous one, rarely exceeding 60 mph and driving behind large trucks in a way that probably decreased my wind resistance. Most of the way was spent on US Rout 22, which eventually turns into I-78 and then I-81.
Though I was driving slowly, the time didn't seem to drag because I was listening to an MP3 of an audiobook of the Swerve: How the World Became Modern about the rediscovery of ancient pagan literature during the Renaissance. Interestingly, it was read by Eduardo Ballerini, someone I actually know and who has had dinner at our house.
Sheetz are gas stations that have a heavy accent on food, sort of like a QuickChek, but even foodier. I didn't bother to see what sandwiches they could make, because I just knew there would be nothing for a vegan. Fortunately around the Carlisle Sheetz are other businesses. At first I walked to a Chinese restaurant and, when I saw they didn't even have a vegetable section or use the word "tofu" (and that all the bean curd dishes also contained meat), I kept walking, past the Dollar General, until I came to a Japanese restaurant, where I ordered two orders of their one advertised vegan roll, one containing cucumber and avocado. I took them back to my car and sat for a time at the base of one of the large boxes associated with the superchargers; I suspect they're high-current transformers, which would be necessary to step the power up to the 480 volts DC that electric vehicles use natively. Some guy with an electric BMW was trying to use a charger that hadn't worked for me, and, it relieved me to see, it wasn't working for him either. I told him my experience, and he moved to another one. Carlisle has four charging stations, but two of them were broken and one of them had been occupied when I showed up (now being used by the guy in the BMW), so I was lucky to have had one available. Carlisle is at a strategic location on the East Coast and the chargers at Sheetz there probably get an unusual amount of use.
The next leg would take me to charging stations at another Sheetz, this one just south of Winchester, Virginia. I drove a bit faster on this leg, partly because it was shorter. I also drank my first road beer on this leg. It was a warm Hazy Little Thing. I'd also switched my audio back to my alternative rock MP3s.
In Winchester, I was feeling like I might need to poop, and there was no way I was going to do it in their bathroom. So I went around the back and climbed through some dense undergrowth (possibly exposing myself to poison ivy) and pooped back there. I then walked along the road, crossing over I-81 on an overpass (taking pictures of the teasel and other flowers) and walking to another gas station hoping to get a battery for the Bolt's key fob, which was apparently dying. Unfortunately, no gas stations were selling this battery and I was told I should try a Dollar General. But I would not by going out of the way in pursuit of that battery; finding one had to be something to occupy my charging time.
The last leg, the drive to Staunton, was the shortest of all, and I drove almost normally. I followed a big truck, as I had on earlier legs, but this truck was moving faster and kept passing other vehicles, and I would pass them as well.
Driving through the center of Staunton, I noticed that barricades had been put up on Beverley Street (Staunton's Main Street) turning it into a pedestrian mall. [Later I would see the barricades had been removed; evidently it's a weekend thing, perhaps begun during the pandemic so restaurants could have more outdoor dining.]
I continued directly to the vicinity of the Howard Johnson (by Wyndham) and then checked in. The building has had a long, troubling history of different owners, starting (I think) as a Holiday Inn in the 1970s. Since then, it's also been a "Quality Inn," which seems to be an off-brand attempt to ride on the Holiday Inn coattails. Now the building is decidedly run-down, like something one would find in socialist Rumania. The building is open-air, like a motel, but multi-floor like a hotel, with entrance to all the rooms from open walkways. I couldn't get the WiFI to work and was too tired to do anything about it. The room had that familiar lived-in-but-sanitized smell I remember from the hotel room I shared with Mercy For Animals colleagues in Columbia, South Carolina.
Teasel overlooking I-81 south of Winchester, Virginia. Click to enlarge.
More teasel.
Poison ivy on a pole south of Winchester.
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