It's time to move on as Fall colors are getting ever closer to peaking.  I'm completely off the supercharger grid now and I've got two long legs to get back on at Normal, Illinois.  My first leg will take me just shy of St. Louis, Mo., to a RV park in Villa Ridge, Mo. 208 miles away.  I charge up to 227 miles (90% capacity) and I'm off.  This means, based on Tesla's algorithm,  I should arrive with 19 miles of charge.  There are many factors that influence how much charge I will actually use; car speed, elevation gain/loss, wind direction, etc.  When I'm in a situation like this, I take a conservative approach and set the cruise control to 60 mph.  I then periodically check the differential between the amount of charge I have, and the distance I have left to travel.  If the differential drops below 19 miles (in this case) I would adjust my speed down to, say, 55 mph. Typically though the differential incrementally increases, allowing me to either, arrive with more than 19 miles of charge, or to increase my speed to 65, 70 or more, as I'm nearing my destination.  On this leg, I arrive at Pin Oak Creek RV Park with 35 miles of charge.  

I check in, pay the unusually high sticker price of $22.21 to charge (grumble, grumble), plug in and plan out my 6 hour, 35 minute layover.

One would think this is an excruciating amount of time to wait for electrons.  Surprisingly, the time goes by pretty fast as I:

• am hungry!
• have laundry to do
• have to catch up on e-mails
• have blog maintenance
• make phone calls
• chat with the folks who stop by, inquiring about the car
• organize/fine tune placement of stuff
• am hungry!

Whites, darks, dedicates, perma-press... it all goes into the same tub.

I use the back shelf area to dry any damp items I have as I'm going down the road.  

Then I'm off to my birth state, Illinois.  Pick up another 227 miles at the Normal supercharger and set the GPS to the burbs in Chicago for a visit with Diane, my friend from childhood who I haven't seen since September, 1992 (I only know this, because she told me so).  Diane is a flight attendant with American Airlines; an "elevated" super human calendar who can give you the year, month and yes, often times even the day, of events from a distant past.  It blows my mind!