Towing with an electric vehicle has worked well over the past couple years. It’s become routine enough that we haven’t been very good about keeping up this journal. But we’ve been limiting ourselves to places within a roughly 300 mile radius of home—basically one big charging stop. This lets us leave Austin around lunchtime and be camped by dinner time. Luckily, Texas has a lot of State Parks within range.
However, we’ve wanted to go to Big Bend National Park for a while, which is quite a bit further. We finally decided to do the trip over Thanksgiving week.
Since most of the campgrounds in the park don’t have power hookups, we decided to stay at an RV park just outside of the park in Terlingua. It would be a bit more than 7 hours of driving (485 mi) along I-10.
But when we plugged that in to EV charging route planners, they suggested a route along I-20 that was almost 200 miles longer (666 mi 🤘). West Texas doesn’t have many chargers to choose from.
Ouch.
But wait, that map shows some chargers along I-10. How far apart are they actually? It turns out the real sticking point is this segment from Ozona to Fort Stockton:
But it’s only 108 miles. We routinely tow 150 on a charge. What’s going on? Ohh… elevation.
We played around with the settings in the route planner a bunch, trying to figure out how good our miles/kWh would need to be to get us there. Adrienne finally found the control that lets you promise to keep your speed below a certain limit. It said we could make it if we stayed below 65 mph. That might not make us very popular on some of the route, but it seemed reasonable.
We did a little research and decided to aim to spend the night in Ozona and do the sketchy segment in the morning with a full battery.
The first day went basically according to plan. We stopped in Johnson City and Junction, charged a bit more than the planner said we needed to at each stop, and arrived in Ozona only an hour later than we’d estimated. We arrived in the dark, pulled in to our site (a pull-through lane in a dirt/gravel lot), and plugged in. We were tired enough that we didn’t notice the water hookup, so we didn’t use water in the trailer overnight. No big deal, we were tired enough that all we wanted to do was get to sleep.
The next day we woke up to a mostly—but not completely—charged battery. We really wanted the full charge to tackle the next stretch, so we stopped at one of the (three!) fast charging stations in Ozona and topped the battery off. This was a bit of a drag because DC fast chargers are fast when charging towards the bottom of the battery capacity. We can go from 20% to 50% charged in the amount of time it takes to amble to a nearby shop and get a snack. But getting from 90% to 100% is sloooow. AC chargers (like the ones at RV parks) maintain a pretty constant (fairly slow) speed, so they’re best used overnight. If we’d spent even 15 minutes at the fast charger before plugging in at the RV park last night, we would have been on the road straight away.
The stretch from Ozona to Fort Stockton turned out to be just fine. I-10 is two lanes, so we just set the cruise control to 65 and everyone who wanted to go faster (the speed limit is 80) just passed us. We arrived in Fort Stockton with 18% battery. That’s a quite comfortable margin. The charger we used in Fort Stockton was the only one on this trip where we had to unhook the camper, which added a little bit of time.
While we charged at our next stop in Alpine, we had a leisurely lunch and looked around a bit. We happened to be there on Art Walk weekend, so there were a bunch of places hosting live music and displaying the work of local artists.
We were making good time, and the charger in Alpine meant that we could do a quick side trip to Marfa and see a little more art before heading on to Terlingua. We stopped at the Chinati Foundation to look at Donald Judd’s outdoor concrete sculptures, and visited Ballroom Marfa to see some recent work by Latinx artists.
Then it was a quick stop back in Alpine and then off to our campsite for the week. This time, we were comfortably before sunset, so we got to arrange things a little more.
We’ll have a separate post about the time in Big Bend, but the trip back was mostly the same. We made all of the same stops, though we spent longer in Marfa. This time we pre-arranged an actual tour at the Chinati Foundation and got to see some of the indoor artworks, including the 100 untitled works in mill aluminum.
Surprisingly, the trip from Fort Stockton to Ozona was dicier in this direction. We set our cruise control for 65 again, but the Rivian was convinced that we wouldn’t make it to Ozona, so we slowed down to 55 and arrived with our battery in the teens again. So it wasn’t the elevation change that was the problem (Fort Stockton is higher than Ozona). It also didn’t seem to be wind. Watching the grass by the side of the road, it was pretty clear that there wasn’t much to speak of. So I’m not sure what makes that stretch of road particularly draining. It’s comforting to know that if we need to extend our range, just slowing down will work. This time we did pre-charge at the fast charger in Ozona before stopping for the night, and woke up to a full battery.
We stopped for lunch in Johnson City and were home to see the cats before their dinner time.
