travel

AGE: 76 GOAL: Learn to Ride a 2-Wheel Bicycle

~ Ken Mirvis ~ Leave a comment

I have spent about 30 minutes each day for the past week trying to learn to ride a bike. I have fallen a couple of times; weaved all over the road; run totally out of steam going uphill; and wondered if I will ever master the damn thing.

It’s not just any bike. It’s a BikeE (that is a manufacturer, not an E-bike) LWB OSS recumbent. “LWB OSS” is recumbent bike-speak for Long Wheel Base, Over Seat Steering. “Long Wheel Base” means that the pedals are behind the front wheel rather than in front of it. “Over Seat Steering” means that the bike has handlebars like a conventional bike rather than a steering mechanism below the seat. My new baby has a 16-inch front tire, a 20-inch rear tire, and 27 gears.

My test rides of a few USS bikes – under seat steering – were a joke. Since there’s nothing to hang on to, I couldn’t even get on the bike, much less ride it with any semblance of control. The bike with conventional handlebars at least gave me a sense that this adventure had a chance … even if only roughly equivalent to that of a snowball in hell.

Here’s how I got to this point. A few years ago, I did a fair amount of bicycling. Two things got in the way: 1) the headwinds were sometimes so strong that I had to pedal to go downhill. 2) a neighborhood dog loved chasing me and nipping at my ankles. (I hate the f-er!) The idea of falling off a bike in my 70s held no appeal whatsoever. All I could think was, “That would REALLY hurt!”

The thought of a recumbent tricycle intrigued me. I couldn’t fall off, and the aerodynamics might help to counteract the headwinds. I was right on both counts, and I loved my recumbent three-wheeler. I rode with dog mace to prevent the nipping (though fortunately, I never had to use it) and cruised for hours on the desolate, scenic back roads of my little Lake Champlain island. Then the downsides started to appear. The bike was heavy and slow, which was a nuisance, but not necessarily terminal. 

The riding angle of the bike proved to be its fatal flaw. Country roads in northern Vermont are well crowned ­– high in the middle and low on the shoulders ­– to help rain water flow, prevent ice build-up, and assist plowing. On a two-wheel bike, when the road bed has a side angle, you just adjust the angle of the bike and you are always sitting straight up. On a trike, you ride at the angle of the road. That is great on a flat road or a bike trail, but not on a crowned country road. Regardless of your direction of travel, your weight is always on your right buttock. After about three years of riding, my butt screamed, “ENOUGH!!!!” I gave myself a case of sciatica that lasted all summer long. Alas, I have not ridden the trike since.

But bicycle riding is just too good an activity to give up easily. After 76 years of reasonably strenuous living, there’s not a part of my body that doesn’t have the capacity to rear its head and reveal types of pain that I never knew existed. Biking is the one physical activity I can do that never hurts (except for one case of sciatica, that is). 

Plus, when I told my cardiologist that I walked a lot, he said, “Not good enough. Get an exercise bike.” So I bought a recumbent Schwin. I ride that bike for an hour or more – 15-20 miles – damn near every day and have done so for years. After a few years of basement pedaling, I am growing tired of the scenery … and too much news in the age of Trump can be nauseating.

Time for another change. I can ride the recumbent exercise bike forever (and have done a bunch of 50-mile rides and one full century). Why not try a two-wheel recumbent? It’s low to the ground with a comfortable pedaling position. I can keep myself upright and not worry about sciatica.

I started going to bike shops to learn about recumbents and maybe take some test rides. I didn’t go to just any bike shops, but big, well-stocked, totally knowledgeable bike shops. Nothing! Not a recumbent in stock, and not a sales person or tech who could give me a real information. I was shocked.

I had an ace up my sleeve. My old high school good buddy from Atlanta, Myron Skott, had contacted me a couple of decades ago. He was biking down the east coast from Maine to Key West along the then-new East Coast Greenway in 2004, and he stayed with us as they passed through Boston. He rode a really nifty recumbent and loved it. In fact, he has been riding the same bike for 21 years!

Myron has become my recumbent bike guru. I learned that there are two bike shops in the northeast that specialize in recumbents: The Bicycle Man in Alfred Station, NY, and Mt. Airy Bicycles in Mt. Airy, MD. One is a 7-hour drive away; the other, a 10-hour drive. Off to Alfred I went.

The Bicycle Man was everything you want a bike shop to be: lots of information, plenty of bikes to test ride, utterly passionate, knowledgeable, and low-pressure sales folks. I arrived at 3:00. They close at 6:00. I left with a new (used) bike in the back of the car at 6:15. Had I arrived at 10:00 or noon, I expect I still would have stayed until their 6:00 closing. I am a pretty good talker and have way more than my share of questions. Lee and Stewart were every bit my equal. You guys were great!!!!!

And that brings me back to now. I am riding my new bike every day. After a half-hour or so, I’m spent. There’s just no gas left in the tank. I can now mount the bike on the first try about 75% of the time, and I can almost ride it in a straight line. I am nowhere close to being able to make a short-radius 180˚ turn. There are 4 little hills in my immediate neighborhood (and virtually no cars since most of my neighbors have made their seasonal move south). I can now handle two of the hills most of the time. Yesterday, I made to within about 20 feet of the top of one of the bigger hills. (The day before, I only made it about halfway up.) Today, I made it to the top with ease!. Now I have the 4th hill to conquer: longer and steeper. 

Once I master my immediate neighborhood, I’ll hit more back roads. A mind-blowing vista sits atop a good-sized hill two miles from my house. On most days, I should be able to make the ride without passing a car. I hope to make it to the top of that hill and take in the view before the snow flies. Then I’ll wait for spring. There are miles and miles of bikeways and rail trails around me. I hope to explore every mile of all of them.

If only I can learn to ride the damn thing! 

Lee The Bicycle Man in Alfred Station, NY with my new toy

Two Backpacks, One Roller Bag, and a One-way Ticket

~ Ken Mirvis ~ 2 Comments

Labor Day has passed and some of the maples are starting to turn. Fall officially arrives in a couple of weeks. Soon, it’ll be winter. Rebecca and I are busy planning our cold weather escape.

I’ve always wanted to spend a month in Crete. Rebecca never got keen on the idea. So we moved a tad west and north and have settled on Malta, Sicily, and the boot of Italy. Not only have we never been there, we know precious few people who have. Here is what I know: the villages look magnificent. The off-season hotels are luxurious, readily available, and a fraction of their peak-season price. The two official languages of Malta are Maltese and English. We can fly directly to Luqa Malta, and from the airport, no place is more than about 30-minutes away by bus. 

Malta, Sicily, and the toe of the boot of Italy

My good friends Peter and his wife Jody are ridiculous world travelers; they know and love Malta and Sicily but have never been to far southern Italy. My cousin Cooper and his wife Lucy spent a month in Sicily and adored it. Other than my father serving in Foggia in WWII, I don’t know anyone who has visited the far southern boot of Italy. Naples will be way north of our travel range. We’ll go there to fly home and spend a day or two visiting Pompeii … and my father’s time there was not exactly a “visit.”

Malta is the world’s tenth smallest country. Its population of 575,000 is slightly larger than that of the Maldives and slightly smaller than Montenegro. Its land area is 122 square miles. (By contract, Grand Isle County, Vermont covers 195 square miles; from our house, no place in the county is more than about a half-hour away.) It was a British colony from 1813 until 1964, when it gained its independence. Its two official languages are Maltese and English. Language will not be a problem there; too bad they still drive on the damn wrong side of the road!

Early in this decade, conservation efforts successfully re-introduced peregrine falcons to the island. If we are lucky, we may catch a glimpse of a bona fide Maltese Falcon. But, I recently learned, if we want to go in search of falcons, we’d be much better off in New York City. It lays claim to having the largest urban peregrine falcon population in the world. (What better way to manage pigeons, I guess.)

Our first stop will be Marsaxlokk (pronounced marsa-schlock), a very old traditional fishing village with a vibrant year-round Sunday open air market. That will be the only reservation we’ll have when we leave the states. We plan to be “slow travelers,” moving to a new destination when we feel like it, sleeping in guest houses instead of hotels, staying for as long as we want, and meeting as many local folks as we can. The people we meet will be our tour guides, telling us what to visit and helping us plan the next leg of our journey, whatever that might be. We’ll come home at the exact moment we feel like it.

If you happen to be one of the few who knows a bit about Malta, Sicily, the Aeolian Islands, and Italy south of Naples, please be in touch. We really want to pick your brain!

Stock photo of Marsaxlokk harbor. Our room will have a view.

An Homage to Dirty Laundry

~ Ken Mirvis ~ 1 Comment

Northern Lights through an iPhone


Background
I am writing this post from cabin #321 aboard the MS Nordkapp, one of the Hurtigruten Line’s Coastal Express ships that sails from Bergen, Norway to Kirkenes, at the Russian border, and back to Bergen. A few important things happen on the journey: we cross the Arctic Circle and sail past “Nordkapp,” the North Cape, just north Honningsvag, the northernmost city in Europe. (Last year, FYI, we went to Sandy Hook, the northernmost point in New Jersey. We also went to Key West, the southernmost point in the continental US, and we’ve been to Anchor Point Alaska, the westernmost highway in the U.S. But now I am just bragging. Those places have nothing to do with Norway or dirty laundry.)

To escape the frigid cold of the northeast, we wanted to do something new. Rebecca had taken a cruise before and was lukewarm on the experience. I had never been on a cruise ship and had little desire. So, we did the only logical thing, we booked a cruise to sail to the Arctic in search of Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights. (Stay tuned. I am rapidly falling in love with my iphone camera!)

Back to Dirty Laundry
We have so many reasons to be close to home, not the least of which is that grandson Elliott celebrated his 7th birthday in our absence. We missed celebrating with him. Plus, when we arrived at the ship, they gave everyone a wifi password and ID. Everything worked except my personal email. I hope to get this post announced as we travel. We’ll see.

We are cruising on a ship, but Hurtigruten ain’t Carnival! Instead of casinos and entertainment centers, our ship is more of a coastal Norwegian ferry, carrying cargo and cars and passengers making their way up the coast. We have lectures about the local culture and sights and tastings of local food. Nature provides most of our entertainment. Instead of a few thousand people on board, we have a few hundred. The crew lets us know of a Northern Lights sighting, but it’s up to us to get clad for winter weather and onto deck to see it.

Being a little homesick on a trip like this doesn’t feel too weird. We are a long way from anything familiar. It’s really cold out. When we make our turn to head back south, we will be three kilometers from the Russian border at the northernmost tip of Europe. We are north of any Norwegian train lines. We don’t know a soul. We don’t know the language. The mountains are stark. The sea is treacherous.

Thank goodness for dirty laundry.

We planned all of our packing around doing laundry. We’re gone for 20 days. We started the trip with a day of travel and three days in Bergen; we end the trip with three days in Oslo and another day of travel. If we did laundry on the first full day of cruising, we would need 5 sets of shirts and underwear. (Trousers can go a lot longer between washings.) If we wash on the first day of our cruise, sometime in the middle, and on the last day, we have clean clothes the entire time. I checked with Hurtigruten about on-board laundry. They have five or six washers and dryers for passengers. (That is about as up-scale as Hurtigruten gets. We stop in 33 different ports, once going north and once going south for a total of 65 stops, most of them lasting for 10 or 15 minutes; we get off and wander once a day … on most days. This is a work-horse of a ship. Thank goodness we can wash our own clothes for just $3 a load … and they provide the soap!)

Yesterday was laundry day #1. Rebecca did not feel 100%, so I did the washing, drying, and folding. It was unbelievably satisfying. Washing our clothes helped me realize that even though we are almost 4,000 miles from home in a strange land with a hostile climate, we have the anchor of OUR clothes still needing to be washed and folded. Doing the laundry gave me a sense of stability and predictability. It provided a moment of knowing that despite all that is different, things are really pretty much the same.

Poltergeist X 2

~ Ken Mirvis ~ 1 Comment

Our usual scout-the-room, jawbone-the-desk-clerk motel-finding practices are long-gone on this trip. We need overnight charging!

Fortunately, a bunch of motel-finding websites, like Hotels.com, Expedia.com, and AAA.com, have EV-charging-station filters. Finding a motel with an EV charger isn’t very hard …. as long as the chargers work and fit your car.

Best Westerns along our route have had lots of chargers. Luckily, we have lots of Best Western points thanks to a credit card promotion and a few hundred dollars-worth of Best Western travel cards I bought at a steep discount to raise money for my daughter’s chorus. As long as we can stay in decent Best Westerns for free and they have chargers, we are good.

We stopped at our first Best Western in Bentleyville, Pennsylvania. It met all of the criteria. We ate supper and went to bed. (How’s that for a good travel adventure?)

Rebecca and I have traveled A LOT. We have stayed in tons of hotels and motels. Neither of us has ever been awakened by a phantom television that comes on by itself in the middle of the night. But that is just what happened in Bentleyville.

At 3:00 AM, I awoke to a loud episode of Seinfeld on the TV. It just came on. No trigger; no nothing. I turned it off and went back to sleep. Ten minutes later, it happened again. It happened the third time around 3:40. I felt pretty smug when I yanked the plug, but the damage had been done. I wasn’t going back to sleep any time soon.

Seven-plus decades of travel. I’ve been awakened plenty of times by pre-set alarm clocks; loud TVs; drunks, fights, and parties; and, of course, way-too-loud hanky panky in the next room. But this was the first time I had ever been awakened by a rogue TV.

In the morning, Jessica, the fantastic desk clerk, listened to my tale of woe and promptly returned my money.

All’s well that ends well. I was a little tired but at least the room didn’t cost anything.

That was Bentleyville.

Two nights later, we stopped at the Best Western in Morton, Illinois. It too fit the bill, even though it had the distinction of having the smallest bathroom ever. (And just in case you are interested, Morton, east of Peoria, is the “Pumpkin Capital of the World.” The Nestle’s plant – two blocks from the Best Western – processes and packs 85% of the world’s canned pumpkin. That’s a lot of freakin’ pumpkin!!!!)

At 2:00 AM, I awoke to a bizarre noise. The TV had no picture, but it seemed to have sound. It must have been our next-door neighbor with the sound turned up too loud. I listened a while hoping I was dreaming then called the front desk to ask them to have our neighbor turn down the volume. But the telephone receiver didn’t work. I could hear the clerk; the clerk couldn’t hear me. I hung up. The clerk called me back. The receiver still didn’t work. By now, Rebecca and I were both awake, totally pissed at the inconsiderate SOB in the next room. I had the hotel number written on a slip of paper. I called it from my cell phone and asked the clerk to please have the neighbor turn down the TV. Then I realized I had given the clerk the wrong room number. When I called back, the clerk laughed. I had called the wrong motel. The noise continued. I really did not want to walk to the lobby.

Rebecca suggested that the sound might be coming from our TV. I clicked the clicker. Silence. For some crazy reason, our TV had half-turned-on. No picture and only a touch of sound. I never could get back to sleep.

In the morning, with bleary eyes, I told the manager what had happened. Once again, I had my money refunded apologetically. I gratefully accepted. There was some solace in not having to pay for yet another night of minimal sleep.

It was weird enough the first time a TV came on randomly in the middle of the night. But twice? Both at Best Westerns? At almost exactly the same time? Somebody has got to be pranking us. 

We stayed at another Best Western the next day in Ottumwa, Iowa and slept through the night. Maybe the spell is broken.

(And just in case you are interested in yet another ridiculous factoid, according to Wikipedia, Ottumwa has been “The Video Game Capital of the World” since 1982 and is home to the IVGHoF — the International Video Game Hall of Fame. I had no idea there were so many world capitals in the rural midwest.)

Three Clicks Got Dorothy Home

~ Ken Mirvis ~ 1 Comment

Dorothy only needed three clicks to get home.  We needed five.

Just before Thanksgiving, we headed from home in Vermont to home in Boston for the holiday. This time, I had the mid-trip charging situation a little more under control … or so I thought.

Midway through the drive, we stopped in White River Junction for a charge. White River has a couple of options, so we figured we’d be safe. I pulled into the Mobil Station, drove all the way around it, and never saw the chargers that were supposed to be there.

No problem. I could see the Chevy dealership up the road that also has a charger.  Off we went for our first (of what I expect will be many) dealership charges. The people were nice. The charging was easy. We sat and played a game of cribbage while we waited. (Rebecca beat me, dammit.)

The battery charged almost to the point we needed, then it just stopped. We wasted about a half hour thinking it was still working, but apparently it wasn’t. The lady at the dealership said that happens sometimes. (Note to self: Make sure things keep working.)

We still needed a bit more charge to get to Boston worry-free. I asked about the chargers that were supposed to be at the Mobil Station. They are there, she explained, but in another parking lot behind the station. No wonder I couldn’t find them the first time.

We pulled up to finish the charge. This time I was a pro at using ChargePoint chargers, so no more lost credit card fiascos. We grabbed a bite to eat then came out to leave.

Techno Side Note: Level 3 EV chargers look a lot like gas pumps and nozzles. The similarities stop there. Instead of a rubber hose, EV charging cables are about 50% larger in diameter and are filled with very densely packed wires. They are heavy, and in winter (and maybe in summer; I just don’t know yet), they are stiff and hard to maneuver. They carry up to 350 kV of DC electricity. That is a lot of juice! The plug, which looks a lot like a gas pump nozzle, needs to be wrestled to get it to line up with the charging outlet in the car. The whole operation is not really hard, but it takes real work, at least for a novice.

When we returned to the now-charged car, the plug was stuck. I didn’t know how hard to wrestle with it. I surely didn’t want to break anything, but it just wasn’t coming out. I punched and punched and punched the little release button. It clicked responsively but nothing budged.

So, I did what I am getting used to doing: I called the lady at ChargePoint. I think I got the same lady who taught me to use my credit card properly a few weeks earlier: sweet and knowledgeable with a very heavy accent who asked way too many unnecessary questions.

She instructed me to lock the car and close the windows, then click the “unlock” button on the key fob five times. Five clicks later, the charging plug lifted gently from its nest, and we were headed home. A new lesson learned.

Dorothy ain’t got nothing on us. We both made it home. I wonder how many more lesson-learned moments await us.

It’s Only a Credit Card. No Big Deal.

~ Ken Mirvis ~ 1 Comment

Last week, Rebecca and I embarked on our second shakedown adventure: A drive from home in Vermont to home in Boston, where we would have to charge up in route. I did my homework, creating a spreadsheet of every charging station along the way. I worked on that spreadsheet for hours. Then we stopped at a rest area to pee. I asked the attendant when he thought they would start installing charging stations at rest areas. He didn’t think that would happen because gas stations were already installing them. There were a few new chargers at the next exit, just a few miles away. My research had never turned them up.

“Great,” I thought, “let’s try them out even though we still have plenty of juice.” We arrived at the charging station five minutes before I had a scheduled Zoom call. We could charge up during my call and leave with enough juice to get to Boston.

But this charger did not accept credit cards. It only accepted payment through the ChargePoint app and a tap of the phone. I had already downloaded the app and put in a payment option, but apparently, I had not yet punched enough buttons.

So, we waited to try again until after my call. After the call, still no luck, so I called ChargePoint. The lady answered pretty quickly, but her accent was so strong that I could barely understand her, and the cold and wind did not help. Despite my inner urgings to stay calm, I was getting frustrated. After endless useless questions and identify checks, I re-entered my credit card information, got the information into “My Wallet,” and tapped the machine once again, this time successfully.

Mindless fool that I am, I laid my credit card on the hood. Then we sat for 15 or 20 minutes while “Mo” took on $10 worth of electricity. I unplugged, and off we went.

Everything worked great. We got good mileage. The drive was easy. The new Level 2 charger at our house worked perfectly. Then we went to a restaurant to pick up some supper. Oh crap! Where was my credit card? DUH! Wherever it blew off the damn hood!

While we waited for our food to arrive, I called the credit card company to cancel the card. No one had used it, so no problems. The new one is in the mail.

Of course, this was the card I use for all of my remote and on-line purchases, so I knew that my stupidity in leaving the card on the hood would cost me hours of work getting a new number into who-knows-how-many sites and apps.

My frustration was palpable. I hated the idea of those wasted hours at the computer and the inevitable one or two that I would neglect to do. I was really pissed at myself. Then the light bulb went off. I reached into my shirt pocket. There it was: the credit card. Instead of leaving it on the hood or putting it back in my wallet, I had mindlessly put it in my shirt pocket. The elapsed time between canceling the card and finding it could not have been a minute, but the deed had been done.

How many more times in this adventure will I multitask to the point of becoming forgetful? The count begins!

A New Adventure: Maybe the Best EV-er! 5,000+ Miles of Uncertainty

~ Ken Mirvis ~ 4 Comments

“Mo”

I had my last car for 10 reliable, maintenance-free, super comfortable years. I called him “Barney” for the first few years of his life because he was nothing special. Just an old Ford. Then, in St. Louis in 2017, as Rebecca and I were driving the length of the Mississippi River, we changed his name to “Mr. Bixby.” Horace Bixby was the riverboat captain who took the young cub pilot Sam Clemens under his wing and taught him the river. Mark Twain’s stories of Mr. Bixby in “Life on the Mississippi” are mesmerizing. His no-messing-around teaching style, his encyclopedic knowledge of the Mississippi, his civil war exploits, and his union organizing made him one of my heroes. Finding his headstone in the Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis became one of the high points of our trip. Mr. Bixby has been in 42 states and a lot of Canada. He’s never once acted up. Even with 160,000 miles under his belt, he’d do great on another road trip. But it’s time.

Like sailing ships, the steam engine, dial telephones, and black-and-white TVs, time is passing him by. He runs on gasoline, powered by an old-fashioned internal combustion engine. Imagine! In 2024!

Both Mr. Bixby’s

A few weeks ago, I signed a two-year lease on “Mo,” a brand-new all-electric Nissan Ariya. I still have Mr. Bixby. I can’t quite let go of him yet. He’s been a gem of a friend. But “Mo” has some serious “MoJo”! I wanted to name him after an aria. (He is, after all, an Ariya.) But my knowledge of opera is limited at best. As I struggled to think of an aria that would make a fitting name for a new car, I landed on two of my favorite operas (or one opera and one operetta, if you are a purist), “The Magic Flute” by Wolfgang Mozart and “Der Fledermaus,” by Johann Strauss. In the absence of a specific aria, I figured the composers would have to do. “MoJo” it would be; “Mo” for short.

”Mo” drives like a dream: comfy, peppy, and full of autonomous features like automatic lane control, windshield wipers that sense moisture, and high beams that never forget to switch off. When I drive past gas pumps, a snarky inside voice gloatingly whispers, “suckers.”

Now it is time to figure out if the world of 2024 is ready for an EV road trip … on back roads, acceding to our whims of the moment.

Here’s the plan: On December 14, our granddaughter Ella opens a show of four years of her art at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. On December 21, grandson Seff graduates from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln with a degree in horticulture. Plus, we have a brand-new great granddaughter in Omaha whom we have not yet met. The drive to Nebraska would normally take us five or six days. We will allow two weeks. “Mo” supposedly has a range of about 270 miles. I am dubious! We’ll be driving in winter at highway speeds. My goal will be to plan a route with chargers every 100 miles or so. That is easy in the densely populated east; it is harder in the farmlands of the high plains and the stubbornness of the deep south; and it is even harder in the wide-open expanses of the far west.

When we arrive at a charging station, it may be out of order. It may be in use. And who knows what else might go wrong! Regardless, we need to be prepared. In the worst case, we have AAA Plus, which gives us 100 miles of free towing … but a tow truck won’t do the job. We’d need a flatbed. Since there is no neutral gear on an EV (because there is no transmission), turning wheels always engage the motor, and since “Mo” is 4-wheel-drive, when a wheel turns, a motor turns. No more tow trucks for us.

Mostly, I suspect we will need lots of patience and a good sense of humor.

Finding charging stations, I am learning, is not so easy! Tesla has an extensive network of high-speed chargers, but they don’t work on other cars. One day, Tesla will adapt its chargers so they work on cars like “Mo,” but the change is coming slowly. We’re not there yet. Maybe next year. 

Then there’s the issue of charging speeds. Level 2 chargers work fine but take 5-10 hours to charge the batteries. That is fine for an overnight, but not a quick juice-up-and-go. Level 3 chargers will charge to 85% in about a half hour. Not bad if you have the right connector – a CCS in “Mo’s” case.

If I were a motel chain, I would install a charger at every property, advertise the hell out of it, and allow EV drivers to reserve a charger when they reserve their rooms. A few hotels and motels, I have learned, are on that trajectory, but it is still precious few. 

Google Maps is in on this adventure too. If you put a route into Google Maps (on your computer but not on your phone) and then hit the “EV Charging” tab, it will show a lot of the charging stations on the route … but not all of the charging stations by any matter of means.

I have also downloaded apps from different charging companies: “PlugShare,” “Electrify America,” “EVGo,” “ChargePoint,” “ChargeWay,” “ViaLynk,” “ChargeHub,” and “FLO.”

NEWS FLASH … QUESTION: How fast is this landscape changing? ANSWER: As I was writing the last three paragraphs, I got an email from Nissan. In that moment, they notified me that they had added a charging station mapping feature to the “My Nissan” app that combines all of the charging apps from the last paragraph. Nissan has done a bunch of the time-consuming work for me. Regardless, I am still planning on an adventure and allotting a lot more time than I would otherwise just to control frustration.

Stay tuned. You’ll get the skinny as it happens. If we indeed choose to go with EV instead of gas, I expect no shortage of adventures.


EPILOGUE: About 10 minutes ago, Rebecca and I decided to go for it!!! The only uncertainty now is a major winter storm along the route, and I expect that would trip us up regardless of vehicle.