Day 4- travel day & YL Lavender Farm
Today was mostly a travel day, getting from Vegas to Salt Lake City. The plan was to be at the Bonneville Salt Flats in time to watch the sunset, but we ended up having to be flexible and go for the sun RISE instead.
The trip from Vegas to SLC was a bit harrowing at times; we ran into massive amounts of construction (spending as much as 30 minutes to an hour stuck in traffic in the mountains several times), extremely high winds blowing us all over (I couldn't use autopilot because I had to keep kicking it off to counteract the wind), crazy drivers (Nik saved our butts a few times) and a storm.
Example of our day- a truck in front had a blowout
one of Nik's multiple saves: (click the icon in the top right of the video near the end for another close call)
That said, we are still really enjoying our trip and getting to hang out & spend quality time together. I was driving during all this, so for pictures of the scenery (it really was beautiful) be sure to go to her blog, it is linked below.
Charge stops today consisted of St George, Beaver, Nephi, and Tooele Utah. During one of the earlier stops we realized I miscalculated the time we needed to leave the hotel and ere over an hour behind due to 1)eating In-N-Out and 2) Vegas is an hour behind the salt flats. We were going to miss the sunset. Shoot. We started discussing how to rearrange our plans to be able to see the sun RISE and decided we just HAD to add an extra day on the end of the trip so we didn't miss this! :-) It was not optional! Knowing this, we felt better about all the slow-downs we had been having throughout the day.
St George is a crazy busy supercharger and was totally full the entire time we were there. The Starbucks claimed to not have a bathroom, but the Porkbelly's staff was really nice/friendly and let everyone who was charging use the bathroom. If you are in the area, stop in and grab a bite from them! Since this was such a busy location, we left a #teslacaching car here. :-) Bonus scenery included here as well b/c I don't have a lot of pics for today's post.
Fun fact: we discovered that the climate control won't stay on if I leave the car, even if my phone stays inside the car, so we started putting on "dog mode" when I got out to use the bathroom and Vanessa stayed in the car. ROFL
As I mentioned, we got caught in another storm, although this one was not nearly as bad. We were close to Nephi, UT when it came up on us and we needed to charge for 15 minutes anyway, so we just stayed there and waited it out. I would NOT recommend this charge stop unless you HAVE to stop here, the bathrooms were disgusting (but at least they were open) and it was one of the more expensive chargers we have stopped at. I will spare you picture of the bathrooms. LOL
After the storm passed we headed north again but only for a short while. We saw a sign for the Young Living Lavender Farm and took a quick detour to take some pictures there. :-)
From the YL farm we continued on to SLC and the Tooele charger where we ate dinner and charged to full. The plan was to go sleep in the salt flats at a truck stop and watch the sun rise. We weren't sure if we would be able to do a round trip or not- it really depended on how much climate control stayed on overnight in camp ode not plugged in- but there was a charger on the west side of the flats that was about 15 minutes away if we couldn't make it back in the morning (we actually did need to go to West Wendover and use it bc my sister kept it an ice box in the car).
We drove through the salt flats from east to the far west and arrived at the truck stop after midnight. We pulled in over with the big trucks, got the bed made up, turned on camp mode with classical music, and set an alarm for 530am to move so we could see the sun rise over the flats. Not long after we stopped talking the radio turned off. I messed with the volume thinking I had turned it down by mistake but it wouldn't come on. We decided maybe Nik lost his LTE connection so Ness put on music from her phone. We fell asleep, and not long after that we were rudely awakened by Nik blaring classical music at full volume. He had regained his signal and I had forgotten to turn the volume back down! Oops! I think we probably woke up all the truckers as well, because it was LOUD. After that we were joking and laughing, but finally went back to sleep and made it through the rest of the night without incident. :-)
Side note, this was an unusual day and we made the best of it and still had some good times. There is ALWAYS at least a LITTLE drama on road trips, so hopefully we got all of it out in one day.
Spoiler alert: day 5 was back to normal and good times!
The numbers for day 4:
total time today: 13 hours (all drive time except ~10 mins at the farm)
miles driven = 537
miles charged = 760 (bc we charged to full twice).
cost of gas: $69.92 assuming 25 mpg
cost of electricity: $24.04 (used all my credits)
Total miles driven: 2233
Total Gas Savings: $242.15
Update: We are adding 1 night because of the driving issues today.
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Vanessa's blog: Travel the World History
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