Day 6 - Grand Junction CO to Twin Falls ID.

 

Well kids, good evening from a long day of travel on day 6th. Its 10:02pm as I type this blog entry. We drove 525 miles from Grand Junction CO, to Twin Falls ID today, where we are now tucked into our hotel for the evening. Another long but very fun day!  We have all the intentions of stopping for the evening around 6:00pm each day - we just can’t seem to manage it. What is it they say about intentions, only good in horseshoes and hand-grenades 😂 Bucky is just so much fun to drive and frankly so easy to drive, we lose track of the time as we burn off another 500+ miles each day. Tomorrow we plan to be home in the afternoon. For those of you keeping score at home, that is almost 3000 miles traveled in 6 days by car, accords this amazing country of ours. Yep it was indeed faster to fly the 3000 miles out to Baltimore on day one, but a lot less interesting. 

Along the way today we saw some AMAZING sites, the southern part of Utah near Moab, and Arches National park (even though we did not make it there exactly) is simply breath taking. The amount of ever changing geology is truly something I encourage you to witness at least once in your life. 

We also had a little driving adventure today. Cheryl deciding to take the first leg of the trip from Grand Junction this morning. At one point I heard her giggle, I was looking down at my phone working on something and looked over to see she was doing 115MPH. Not much wind noise to speak off in Bucky, no cylinders groaning or transmissions winding up - just this soft gently breeze going by and the little girl giggle of my wife of 34 years from the drivers seat. I am starting to suspect I may not get this car back when we arrive home. I may have to call my BMW contacts and tell them to order me another one. Hmmm I hear the new I 7 series electrics are nice…… 

I also learned that my amazing wife does not do well on 2 lane hi-ways. This occurred on hi-way 16 up to Salt Lake City. Let’s just say that some colorful language was spoken (yelled?) at the drivers in front of Bucky who were in the left lane and refuse to move over quick enough to the right lane on those uphill climbs. You know - where the trucks were supposed to pull over to allow faster traffic to pass. But in this case it was minivans of family’s on a nice leisurely drives being hunted down buy a wild red-head coming up on them at Mach 1.3 with no mercy’s while yelling GET THE F*** OUT OF THE WAY. I was actually afraid for those pore souls life’s (and mine). I sheepishly said at one point, “you know honey, you have become one OF THOSE BMW drivers” and my usually mild mannered wife looked over at me with a look that I can only describe as one of humor and evil, all rolled up into one.  When we got into Provo and she pulled over at a McDonald’s to use the restroom, and get a drink, I slid over into the drivers seat. I figured it was safer that way for all the residents of Salt Lake that way. Whew…..😱😂

We pulled over a little while later at a Sam’s club to pour some electrons into Buck, and I realized this was going to be a cheap stop - I don’t have a Sam’s club card. YES! Hahahahha. After that we went into Salt Lake and ate at one of my favorite Mexican Restaurants - The Famous Red Iguana. We lucked out in a getting a table fast and the food as always was Nom Nom Nom. If you like Mole’s - THIS is the place for you. 

From there - we headed up to Antelope State park and got some incredible views of the Great Salt Lake and photos with Bucky. Of course we had to stop at the gift shop at the park. Gifts for the grand nuggets are on their way home. The great salt lake is absolutely starkly beautiful. Luckily I needed to get home, or I would have made a beeline over to the the Bonneville salt flats, where it is the first week of speed week on the Salt Flats. Next time and for another trip. 

The final leg of our journey this day towards home in Washington state took us on a not so scenic route home via Hi-way 15 and Hi-way 84 where we crossed over into Idaho. I think I gave Cheryl a mild case of range anxiety when I mentioned we had 145miles to go on the GPS to our next stop and only 190miles left on the guess-o-meter, we had some small hill climbs to go, but the battery charge looked good and for once on this trip, I just did the speed limit (80MPH - LOVE IDAHO speed limits) and we arrived at our final charging stop for the evening at a place called Stinkers fuel stop. The EA chargers seemed to have very tired hamsters at this stop and it seemed we could not get the hamsters to generate more than 56KW of power for Bucky. We tried all the stations, hoping it was just a station issue, but alas, Stinkers must not have made the appropriate sacrifices to the electron gods, and we just had a slower than normal charging session. I did try and whip the hamsters though, but to little avail. 

That brings a close to this blog entry tonight. I have planned our last seven hour jaunt home to southeastern WA via the Electrified America app and some google maps. Apparently ARBP (A better Route Planner) was not being “better” this evening and since our little incident in Topeka a couple days ago - I have come to double check everything on the suggested route and trip between charges, just to be sure.  That has worked brilliantly for me so far. 

So with that, I bid you ado. I will update you all tomorrow evening with the final day of adventures, I don’t anticipate much. It is mostly Idaho, Oregon and Washington deserts (boring compared to what I have seen this week).

See you all tomorrow.