On the Road with the Redmonds (Part 3)
The final one, I promise.
One of our biggest concerns leaving Minnesota in our Tesla were the bounds that we felt the car would make on our ability to explore outside the margins. My wife and I are both pretty unconventional in our thinking and our approach to life, and we didn’t want to get locked into having to stick to major highways on our travels across the country.
The trip was supposed to be open and fluid and I was very concerned that some of the places we wanted to go to would be too far or stretch the range parameters that the car was capable of.
The trip off the highway into Whitefish and then on to Glacier National Park was one of those first forays into the unknown. The destination charger at the hotel gave us the confidence we needed to explore and push those limits, it became a different trip thereafter.
We forgot about range anxiety and started to enjoy the adventure. Huddling together at night looking at where we could go and how we could make it happen. We added a loop in Northern Washington that took us around the entire Olympic National Park where we saw one of the most breathtakingly beautiful lakes, found a 3 in one stop at the northern most point where we could do our laundry, eat and charge at the same time, got directions to a magical drive thru an old world forest and found a black sand beach purely by accident.
The car encouraged us to slow down, and forced us to take the slower winding roads rather than blast from one hotel to another as quickly as we could.
Just outside Coeur d’Alene, Idaho we stayed in the car for the first time, although we moved once—
I was convinced the solo old dude parked in the pickup a half mile down the lonely road we were camping on was a killer waiting for his next victim.
We also found our best meal in the same town because we needed to grab a few extra miles for the next part of the trip.
Camp mode gave us the ability to focus on finding some extra cool places to stay just because we could—keeping the car nice and toasty inside while we slept somewhat comfortably in the back. We found a cool campsite outside of Cape Disappointment (where the largest ocean and largest river meet), a pull off overlooking the Pacific where we could hear the crashing of the waves against the rocks, and a beautiful park overlooking a lake. Million dollar views and zero dollars out of our pockets.
Even our mistakes led to great stories-(Look up the wonderful town of Burns, OR when you have a chance)! We got lucky several times. The most evident of these was deciding that the road closed sign in the middle of Northern California was not meant for us.
Then finding out that the road wasn’t really closed it just kind of got smaller and smaller until you found yourself 5000 feet up with no place to turn around and fearful that you would just slide down to your very painful death and someone would just put a “Dumbass” sign on your gravestone.
I won’t bore you with the numerous other details that I could fill these pages with except to say that we began to trust in the car as we moved along. By the time we were done we had traveled 6100 miles and covered 9 states in those 14 days.
We had grown closer to each other as well. Our faith in the car was matched by a strengthening of our relationship. Each mile building that connection. Each discussion drawing us closer to each other.
As we turned up the final few miles listening to our favorite song on the way towards our home, we both had tears in our eyes and knew that the best was yet to come.
