Road trip!

Road trip!  We'll be on the road from early Monday morning to late Wednesday evening, heading up to Kalispell, Montana to the Lazy K Wrought Iron shop to pick up the latest things they've made for us.  That includes beautiful wildlife silhouette railings for our front porch, plain railings for the entrance to our sun room, and all the metal parts for two stairs and railings for our deck (the latter matching the deck railings they built for us last year). 

We've got a nearly 600 mile long drive ahead of us tomorrow, the majority of it (sadly) on I-15.  However, the last 20% or so will be on surface roads, including a nice long drive alongside the gorgeous Flathead Lake.  We'll spend Tuesday in the Kalispell area, picking up our stuff and doing some sightseeing (including more time around Flathead Lake).  Then on Wednesday we'll head back, basically retracing our steps.

This trip illustrates one of the things we like the least about long-distance drives in the Tesla: our routes are limited to those which take us near the supercharger locations – and those are, of course, mostly near freeways.  In the future we hope to change that, by two means.  First, Tesla is aggressively expanding their supercharger network – even by the end of this year there will be many more locations, including the first wave of “off freeway” locations.  Second, we'll be putting together a trailer that includes a diesel generator.  That trailer-with-generator will have two purposes.  First, it will house not only the generator, but also our Nikola electric off-road vehicle, due to arrive in early 2019.  The generator can then charge both the Tesla and the Nikola.  This will allow us to travel in the Tesla to out-of-the-way four-wheeling destinations, such as the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, Alaska, or the Canadian Rockies.

But meanwhile: road trip!  Blogging may be light-to-nonexistent for a few days...