Happy New Year!

Orange grove parking

After spending a couple of days enjoying the hospitality at Chez Ann & Jeff, we left sunny California and headed to rainy California. Most of our drive today was in the rain. Luckily we are from the PNW, and the rain wasn’t bad by our standards.

We managed to get to Bakersfield with only one charging stop, at Harris Ranch in Coalinga. This supercharger is one of the largest with 80 chargers, and two are pull through which is great for towing since we don’t have to unhitch. We have stopped here many times before and never had an issue until today. Our problem was pretty minor, just a hassle.

The two pull through spots were open so we picked one. Soon, a non-Tesla EV pulled into the other. Because of their charge port location, they preferred these chargers too. Our charger failed after a few minutes. We tried multiple times but got the same error. This is incredibly rare for a Tesla Supercharger. However, at this point the second pull through was in-use. The car in the other pull-through spot was nice enough to move for us. Unfortunately, the other EV that moved for us got errors when they tried a third charger. We went into our RV and rewarded their kindness with a bar of chocolate, then helped direct them to the Electrify America charger nearby. We saw several other non-Tesla EVs with similar problems, so we think that many chargers were failing today, particularly with non-Tesla vehicles. Eventually, we were able to charge enough to get to our destination.

We drove to one of our hidden gems of an RV park in Bakersfield, Orange Grove RV Park. The RVs park among the orange trees. You can pick as many oranges as you like as long as they are ripe. Since we are not crossing into Mexico, we plan to get our fill of oranges!

Fresh picked oranges for dessert on New Year’s Eve!

Being New Year’s Eve, the quiet hours tonight don’t start until 12:30 am. I don’t think we will have a lot of noise, but it will definitely be better than last year! We plan to stay inside the trailer, keep warm by curling up under a blanket and stay awake late enough to ring in the New Year on New York time.