Gary’s Excellent Coast-to-Coast Tesla Adventure

I am in CA, which means the plane didn’t crash. The trip was a normal and uneventful day of flying, meaning it was miserable. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

When I emerged from the big sliding doors of the San Jose airport, beating life back into my legs, Randall was right there . He knew more about my flight than I did, just glancing at his phone. We got into the Tesla and took off.

Linda, Lily’s mom, came out to help with the last couple of days of packing and to fly back with them, lending both her hands (remember: one baby and three cats). I flew into San Jose, Linda flew in to San Francisco (SFO) and hour later, so Randall and I were on our way to SFO so he could pick up Linda and the big SUV he had rented. They needed the rental so they could all get to the airport on Sunday; I couldn’t drop them off because 1) the Tesla will be crammed full of more of their stuff and 2) we all wouldn’t fit anyway. So Randall went into SFO, and I drove the Tesla back to his house.

I don’t know how this blog is going to go, but I think there will be lots of interesting items about the Tesla, so I’ll include them when I remember them. Here are some:

The Tesla looks like any other car from the outside. I’ve never been able to tell one car from another, for the most part, but this one has nice lines (much nicer than my ugly new-model Prius). It’s dark blue, which is the color I would have chosen.

When you get inside, it’s another story. I’m always startled when I get in, after we’ve been away. There’s no dashboard, no buttons, no gauges, knobs or readouts. Nothing – except what is probably a 22″ monitor to the right of the steering wheel, tiled toward the driver for better visibility. Everything’s done from there, except shifting, cruise, turn indicators, and turning on the windshield wipers (did I mention it was raining?) If you want the wipers to go faster, or intermittent, or slower, or off, you have to use the touch screen, which I think requires the driver to take their eyes off the road too often for too long a time.

The thing I think I’ll like best about driving this car is the regenerative braking (not sure that’s the right term, but it’s close). In the Tesla (and in the Prius and, probably, other electrics or hybrids), when you use the brake, some of the energy you generate is channeled back to the battery, to help recharge it. In the Tesla, though, you don’t even have to use the brake. As soon as you back off the accelerator, the brakes engage very smoothly and you slow down much faster than you would while “coasting” in any other car. This sounds troublesome, but it’s not, and the result is that you don’t need to use the brake unless you want to come to a complete stop (or if someone cuts you off). So the brakes recharge the batteries every time you lift off the accelerator, whether you use the brakes of not. I just hope I’ll remember to begin using the brake pedal after I get home…

There is no gas motor and accompanying accessories, so there’s a lot of room under the hood to pack stuff for the trip. This space is called the frunk. I’m not making this up.

Enough for now. Gwen is awake, so it’s time to go admire her.

For those of you who are thinking, “Is he like totally ignorant of how cell phones work?” : I am pretty close to totally ignorant of how cell phones work. I don’t know how to: listen to music; delete an app; move my apps around on the (desktop?); send a text to someone who hasn’t first sent me one; do almost anything online. I spend (many) whole days without my cell phone because I didn’t grab it on my way out the door.

So that’s why I had so much trouble understanding how to get music on my phone in a way that I could actually play it. I have a printed out copy of my boarding pass for tomorrow folded up in my wallet, because I didn’t know where the boarding pass would go if I clicked “digital copy.” Etc.

Why is this important? It’s important because a Tesla doesn’t have a key. To get it locked and unlocked, and to start and drive it, you need a specialized device.

A cell phone.

More specifically, a cell phone with an app that is attuned to your specific car. A cell phone that is charged. A cell phone that is in your pocket and not on the nightstand back home.

Wish me luck.

It’s Thursday night; tomorrow morning Abbey and Whitsun and I eat breakfast at Morey’s in Oneonta, drive to Albany Airport where they drop me off for a 11:50 AM flight to San Jose, and they continue on to our house in Truro, Cape Cod, which we rent out in the summer and enjoy in the not-summer.

When I drive ten or twelve hours a day, I listen to booktapes. During the first few trips the books were on CD, borrowed from the library, which means that I was limited to whatever the library had at the time I left, and that I had to fumble with CDs all across America. A few years ago, we discovered an app that puts all the audiobooks in any library in the country at your fingertips, through your phone. I got a library card at the New York Public Library (the one with the lions) and have a massive number of books just a few clicks away (if this kind of thing interests you, let me know and I’ll give you all the details).

Whitsun wanted to send me off with some music, as well, so he took on what proved to be a monumental task: copying music, from his PC and mine, to my phone in a way that I could access it. Apparently phones are made for streaming music, not for loading files from a computer, and in fact it seems as if phone manufacturers have purposely made it difficult to do anything but stream. But Whitsun – who is the master of using YouTube videos to learn just about everything he needs to know – got it figured out, and now I have a musical option, between books or chapters. His selections are heavy on the Gorillaz, They Might Be Giants, a 90s style rock opera based on War of the Worlds, and some Star Wars hip-hop. He also successfully loaded my road trip song file, which is heavy on the folk music and Jackson Browne.

On the way home, during my first trip, I took a wrong turn going through Oklahoma City, and before long I was many miles out of my way. I had gone north instead of northeast, so I thought maybe I could get off the northbound Interstate and drive east on local roads until I ran into the Interstate I needed. This, of course, turned into getting even more lost, this time in the middle of nowhere. I remember noting that middle-of-nowhere Oklahoma looked a lot like middle-of-nowhere New York.

During this interesting diversion, I was listening to NPR, and they were interviewing a guitar duo I had never heard of , Rodrigo y Gabriella. They played a few songs and I was hooked. I pulled over into someone’s dirt driveway and wrote their name down on a map, and when I got home I started listening to their music.

Long story short (too late!): at the very beginning of each trip west – starting literally when driving out of the driveway – I have played their first album all the way through. It sounds a lot like I feel when I’m finally free to drive west.

Randall and his wife Lily have decided to move from Fremont, CA to Weymouth, MA! They actually decided to do that about fifteen minutes after they arrived in California, but it took six years to make it happen.

Randall and Lily are both family-oriented folks, and both found it hard to move so far away. Lily grew up near Boston, and her parents still live there, in the house she grew up in. Randall’s idea was to become fabulously wealthy and then they could move back and live near family and do whatever they wanted. Lily, who is an awesome middle school English teacher, is probably a little more realistic, but both have been planning their return since they arrived in the Golden State.

Randall is a software engineer and the San Francisco Bay area is the promised land. He left NY in May of 2013, only one semester from graduation from college, and flew to CA to take a job with a digitial startup – he was the first employee. The company was just starting, so to speak. In December of 2013 he came back east to marry Lily, which was, in our opinion, an excellent idea, and they flew back to CA, shortly followed by me in my Prius filled with all of Lily’s belongings that would possibly fit. What a trip! It was the first of five round-trip journeys along the Interstates of America from sea to shining sea.

Those were great trips. My extended family has dwindled to four cousins, all of whom moved from Long Island to the westernmost reaches of the country, and I got to visit them as well as Randall and Lily. I also completed my 50 states (last one: Oklahoma), did an end run around the Rockies on a number of occasions to avoid snowstorms, and saw more beautiful country than I can possible process.

This isn’t a blog about those trips, but they were great trips. I’ve written about them elsewhere. This is a blog about helping Randall and Lily move by driving their Tesla from one ocean to the other. They get to pack up and move themselves, their stuff, their baby, and three cats from one coast to the other; I get to drive a high-concept luxury car across this endlessly stunning land, for a week.

So that’s where we start.