I'm off!

Some notes from the road

Proof of life

It is great finally getting started after planning this trip for a year or so. It was a cold morning in Ottawa (-8) Thursday and I will admit that my joy at hitting the road was mitigated a bit by my obsessive watch on what range I was getting in my EV. The worry was not so much for the first day. Between Ottawa and Sudbury there are a fair number of chargers. But on Friday, I will be travelling between Sault Ste Marie and Wawa—a distance of 200 km without a charger (and very intermittent cellphone coverage). So far as I can see, in my entire 10,000 km. trip over the next couple of months or so, that will easily be the biggest distance between chargers.

So I wanted to use my first day to test my car.

As you can see from the photograph above, when I left Ottawa in the morning, my car was promising a 333 km range. But that prediction is based on an algorithm fed by recent driving habits. Of course, prior to Thursday, I had been driving in town mainly, and unlike internal combustion cars, EVs get better mileage in town than they do on the highway.

In fact, it became pretty apparent early on in my drive that the range predicted by the algorithm was ticking down more quickly than the distance to my first destination—a charger at a Quality Inn in Petawawa. I found if I turned off the internal heater, the algorithm would suddenly jump my range considerably. But as the temperature dipped further from the initial -8 as I drove northwest, I found I could really use the heat. So I would turn it on periodically when I got too cold and then turn it off again.

I realized when I got to Petawawa that I had gone too far with my precautions because when I stepped out into the crisp morning air to recharge, I immediately began to shiver hard. The kindly young woman at the reception desk of the Quality Inn, allowed me to take some free coffee and warm up while I charged. As I defrosted, I realized I had once stayed at this very establishment—with my son Alex at a hockey tournament.

It also took me much, much longer to charge than I had counted on. This first charge—at an Ivy station—took me more like 90 minutes than the 30 or 35 I had expected. (The Ivy charging network, which is a joint venture by Hydro One and Ontario Power Generation, has been notoriously unreliable.)

Luckily, the next charge, at a Flo terminal in North Bay, was more in line with expectations. Just time enough to walk over to a mall and buy a Winnipeg Jets hat, which I unsuccessfully tried to bargain down in price based on the fact that it would likely be worthless in two weeks.

By the time I made it to Sudbury, I concluded that the actual range of the car, in these conditions, is probably closer to 270 km. than 330. Friday will be a bit warmer which will boost the range somewhat. I should be OK. On to Wawa!!!

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For those who think I am crazy driving from Ottawa to Victoria and back in an EV, here’s an article from the BBC about a Scottish couple, Chris and Julie Ramsay, who plan to drive an EV from the magnetic North Pole to the South Pole. How are they going to charge where there’s no electricity, you ask? A wind turbine and “double solar”—whatever that is.

Now that’s crazy.

Couple set for pole-to-pole EV challenge

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Thanks to everyone who expressed concern about my damaged rear bumper, which I discussed in my last post. At the time, I did not think it would be such a big deal. However, my insurance company, Aviva Traders, turned out to be epically incompetent at the seemingly simple task of obtaining photographs of the damage from me or the body shop. Maybe 30 phone calls and emails later, and an offhand mention of small claims court, they finally sent someone to look at the car, eleven days after the accident. But a big shout-out to Joe, the owner of Bemac Auto Body on Clyde in Ottawa, who got the job done in the nick of time despite Aviva’s foot-dragging. I collected the car at 5 p.m. Wednesday, 14 hours before my scheduled departure, all fixed.

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People have asked me what I am going to listen to as drive. Lots of CBC radio, of course. I also have Sirius FM in the car for BBC, cable news (i.e. Trump) and music.

I have recently started listening to the Anglo Saxon England podcast. This is from the guy who is also doing the History of England podcast. He’s now up to the 17th century after 368 episodes of that project. He says he thinks his original coverage of the Anglo-Saxon period when he first got started years ago was rubbish, so he is redoing it. Lol.

I have also downloaded the audio book of Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hamalainen, the celebrated new history of Europe’s half millennium contact and clash with North America’s Indigenous peoples.

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For reading (while not driving) I have just started Janet Malcolm’s posthumously published collection of loosely linked autobiographical and photographical essays, Still Pictures. Also aboard, I have Louise Erdrich’s novel The Round House, set in a first nations community in my native North Dakota; Alice Roberts’ history of the first millennium in Britain, Buried; and a “biography” of the Nine Quarters of Jerusalem by Matthew Teller.