This series of blogs chronicles the Intrepids’ adventures driving round North America in an electric car. So far we have covered 30,000km from LA to Alaska, across Canada to Newfoundland down the east coast islands of the US and via the Gulf Coast to Arizona, without so far running out of electricity. After exploring the Maritimes, this blog sees us hitting New York, exploring the Outer Banks, on the road again with Willie in Nashville, seeking Elvis in Memphis and watching the moon over Bourbon Street in the Big Easy, before joining The Searchers looking for John Wayne and John Ford in Monument Valley.
We left off the last blog heading over the bridge from New Brunswick, Canada to Lubec in Maine, hoping that the customs man would let us back in to the US to finish the journey. After a brief interrogation and handing over $6 he grants us a few extra days on our visa and waves us through. Quite a relief as we never knew whether our 3 months in Canada would reset our entry clock. Seems it doesn’t but at least we have a few days in reserve.
Heeding the advice we were giving on Fogo Island, we head for Bar Harbor on the Acadian island of Mount Desert, a popular holiday destination which specialises in lobster. After an overnight stop, and a welcome recharge at the neighbouring College of the Atlantic, we tour the island’s rugged coastal national park and press on southwards towards Portland. Driving along the New England coast we pass through Portsmouth and under Boston, stopping briefly at the founding fathers’ landing place at Plymouth before reaching Cape Cod. There’s a lovely old inn awaiting, which used to be a sea captain’s home. We decide to stay an extra night and spend a wet day watching movies at the Chatham Orpheum, which unlike its Cremorne namesake doesn’t have a wurlitzer.
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| Acadia National Park, Mt Desert Island, ME |
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| Stormy seas, Cape Cod |
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| Sea Meadows Inn, Cape Cod |
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| Cape Cod coast |
After a day of storms and grey skies, one of the very few on this entire trip, the following day is beautiful and clear. We make the most of it by exploring the Cape Cod and the Massachusetts coast before driving to New York where we arrive on Friday afternoon in rush hour. Fortunately we make it down the length of Manhattan and through the Holland Tunnel to our parking spot in Jersey City just in time to jump aboard the last ferry to Wall Street.
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| Hi speed ferry arriving at Wall St |
Coming in to New York City by boat is definitely the way to arrive, and is becoming a habit, as it’s just over a year since we sailed into New York Harbour aboard the good ship Nasdaq in the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race. Then we moored at Liberty Landing in Jersey City, across from the World Trade Centre and the same place as the ferry we take this time. With the lights of the city coming on, a full moon rising over Brooklyn and the floodlit Statue of Liberty standing sentinel, we are the only passengers on the ferry so feel we are on our own private cruise. Disembarking, we do a quick Wall Street shuffle to our AirBnB, a WeLive pad on Wall St, It’s a slightly upmarket version of a student hostel but a great base for catching up with Alex and Lucy. While we have been travelling they have just moved to New York after three years in LA and are staying in an apartment nearby while they wait for the furniture to arrive and their newly refurbished flat in Brooklyn to be ready. It’s great to see them and explore the city with its newest residents.
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| Family gathering in Brooklyn Botanical Gardens |
However with Uncle Sam threatening to throw us out we can’t stay too long, so after a few days of not sleeping in the city that never sleeps, we are heading south through the industrial landscape of New Jersey. Unfortunately a Bonfire of the Vanities wrong lane choice in the complex web of expressways, bridges and tunnels means a long detour through parts of the city best left unseen and sees us limping into a New Jersey supercharger with only 2 miles of charge left in the tank, way too close for comfort.
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| The car enjoying a rest in New Jersey |
With much relief we fill up with electrons and are off down the Garden State Parkway arriving just in time to catch yet another ferry, a car one this time from Cape May to Lewes in Delaware. We’re discovering that virtually the entire eastern coast of the US is lined with thin, low lying islands. They stretch like a chain of breakwaters, broken by occasional bays and inlets for thousands of miles from Cape Cod down through Long Island to the Outer Banks of the Carolinas and Georgia, and on to Florida and the Keys. While barely visible on most maps of the US, we discover by zooming in on Google Maps that there are extensive settlements, cities and highways along much of the length of the islands, which are sometimes so far off shore that they can’t be seen from the mainland. Of course, since we are driving around the coasts of North America we have to follow these highways, venturing along the Barrier Islands of Delaware and Maryland and out on to the windswept Outer Banks of North Carolina. Unfortunately Hurricane Dorian whom we had recently encountered in Nova Scotia had also visited the Outer Banks, taking out Highway 12 on Ocracoke Island south of Cape Hatteras. With sand streaming across the road we make a U turn and retrace our route to the curiously named Taratino-esque Kill Bill Hills. (actually it's called just as curiously Kill Devil Hills). Located 20 miles offshore, with a pounding ocean and high sand hills on one side and a calm lagoon full of fishing boats on the other, it’s the place where the Wright Brothers carried out their experiments to become the second people to fly a manned, powered plane.
Back on the mainland we cut west towards Charlotte, where we catch up with friend Emily who shows us the sights of her attractive city, with its museums, art installation, its cafes and breweries.
Then it’s off to the country roads of the Blue Ridge Parkway, accompanied by John Denver and Olivia Newton John, stretching 400mi down the backbone of the Appalachians from Maryland to Tennessee. It’s a spectacular drive along winding mountain roads through mixed deciduous forest just starting to turn, with extensive views in all directions. To help us on the way, at Asheville we pick up an escort of 130 other teslas from the Triangle Tesla Owners Club of North Carolina. It’s the largest gathering of teslas we have seen in one place, possibly more than in the whole of Australia and they are very welcoming of us interlopers. We promise to try to return next year for their drive along the Outer Banks, when the road’s repaired.
The hillbilly music gets louder as the journey continues westwards through Cherokee and the Great Smoky Mountains, until the Nashville Skyline comes into view and we hole up in Music Row. The music is in full swing on Broadway with each bar trying to outdo its neighbours in volume or talent. No lock out laws here as we take in the music from a roof terrace at 1am, with Willy, Waylon and Johnny blasting from every doorway. It’s all great fun, incredibly lively and vibrant.
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| a few gold discs at the Country Music Hall of Fame |
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| Elvis's gold plated cadillac |
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| Nashville Broadway |
But after a visit to the Country Music Hall of Fame the road is calling again. The Mississippi Delta is shining like a National guitar as we follow the river down the highway through the cradle of the Civil War. We’re heading towards Gracelands, Memphis Tennessee. Unfortunately Elvis has already left the building by the time we get there, and there’s no sign in his birthplace of Tupelo either, although both Van the Man and Nick Cave have been there before us. In Memphis we hang out in Beale Street with BB King and the Rock‘n’Roll hall of fame sitting in Elvis’s gold Cadillac trying to catch the vibe. It’s midday and no one’s rocking round the clock, the last of last night’s stragglers have long since staggered home, the guitars are weeping silently, the blue suede shoes have been shaken off and there ain’t a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on. So after visiting nearby Belle Meade, a great southern plantation house where they bred thoroughbreds, pretty much all the Derby winners for the last 100 years, we arrive in Kosciusko.
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Belle Meade, nr Nashville
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Like the Australian version which is named after an obscure Polish hero who’d probably never heard of Australia let alone visited it, this one also didn’t make it onto the great man’s itinerary, although he did actually live in the US for a time and was a hero of its civil war.
Kosciusko Mississippi is a pleasant little town and although totally devoid of restaurants does claim Oprah Winfrey as its most celebrated daughter.
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| Kosciusko Courthouse |
Needless to say, as with Elvis’s, we don’t visit her birthplace either but continue down the Natchez Trace Parkway towards New Orleans. These US parkways are a great idea, usually long tree or forest lined 2 lane roads, with no commercial traffic, billboards or stripmalls, created and maintained as scenic routes. The 700km Natchez Trace follows an old indian trading route linking the lower reaches of the mississippi with Nashville and is a pleasant drive although the abundant deer and turkeys call for vigilance, particularly at dusk.
The moon is rising over Bourbon Street as we hit the Big Easy, where we meet up with fellow Clipper crew, James and Jenny for some of New Orleans special cocktails and on to dinner. Bourbon St is noisy, brash and crowded with touts and tourists so to catch some jazz we head east to Frenchmen St, lined with music bars and bistros. As tourists, we do the obligatory paddle wheeler cruise aboard the SS Natchez, have coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde and spend our lives in sin and misery at the house of the rising sun.
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| New Orleans |
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New Orleans
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| New Orleans |
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| Paddle steamer on the Mississippi |
Without stopping to tell our children not to do what we have done, we press onwards to Lafayette, where more music awaits us at the Blue Moon Saloon. It’s good ole Louisiana swamp blues from Eric Lindell in a bayou cabin on the outskirts of the city which keeps us on our feet until long after bedtime.
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| Eric Lindell and friends at the Blue Moon Saloon, Lafayette |
Taking the Gulf Beach highway through the bayous and swamps we reach the sea on the third side of the continent; it’s muddier than the Pacific and Atlantic, and less blue than the Labrador Sea or Lake Superior far to the north. The road is virtually on the beach less than a metre above the tideline so we are relieved there are no hurricanes forming in the Gulf of Mexico. There are plenty of dolphins and pelicans however as we take our 17th and last ferry of the journey from Port Bolivar to Galveston. Glen Campbell has long got off the line but Galveston lives on as an attractive each side resort, with its Victorian pier and old town centre. It lies in the shadow of Houston which we by-pass on a maze of 12 lane freeways en route to San Antonio 200 mi further west.
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| Last ferry to Galveston |
We learn about its spanish mission past as we visit some of the remaining world heritage listed missions on the city’s outskirts. The city centre has a unique series of canals and walkways lined with restaurants and bars, created as a visionary urban regeneration project in the 1920s. It also houses the Alamo, a former Spanish mission taken over by the US army and captured by Mexico, the loss of which became the rallying cry for the subsequent battle which led to the creation of Texas as an independent nation. Texas didn’t last long and eventually joined the Union.
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| Mission San Jose, San Antonio |
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| Mission San Jose, San Antonio |
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| The Alamo, San Antonio |
Everything about Texas is big, from its hats and pickups to its steaks and skies. Driving across it is a bit like driving across the Prairies in Canada, endless and needing careful planning around charging stops. Fortunately there are plenty of superchargers in this oil fuelled paradise and we chew up the miles through Abilene, the home of the national museum of children’s book illustration and Amarillo. Just outside Amarillo we come across Cadillac Ranch with its curious sculpture of 8 graffiti covered cadillacs embedded upright in a muddy field. We spray our message “the Future is Electric” in fluro aerosol paint and move on to arty farty Santa Fe in New Mexico.
Santa Fe’s a pretty town with brightly coloured ochre, red, yellow and blue adobe buildings, full of art galleries, boutiques hotels, jewellery shops and western outfitters. It's also a ski resort so we promise to come back next winter. We enjoy some delicious nouveau mexican influenced dinner at Cafe Pasqual and are treated to an open night at the New Mexico Museum of Art.
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| New Mexico Museum of Art |
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| Sante Fe's Museum of Contemporary Native Arts |
There’s a TV news item about the Albuquerque balloon festival so we hightail it down the highway to see thousands of hot air balloons of all shapes and sizes take to the skies in the biggest display of its kind anywhere in the world.
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| Shiprock, NM |
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| Twin Rocks, Bluff, Utah |
All too soon we’re off across the New Mexican desert towards Shiprock, a massive sandstone outcrop resembling a ship’s prow or a castle, take your pick, visible for miles. The scenery becomes increasingly spectacular with weathered red, orange and brown sandstone cliffs, arches and monoliths set against a clear blue sky. We quickly lose track of which state we are in, and what time it is, passing in quick succession from New Mexico to Arizona, through Colorado to Utah, all with different time zones. Eventually at dusk with a full moon rising over the canyons and the sandstone cliffs glowing in the sunset, we arrive in Bluff and a lovely little hotel. It’s surprising to find a non-chain hotel which is well furnished, well maintained and well managed.
As an aside, typically we have found the family run non-chain or non franchised hotels to be generally under capitalised, with low standards of maintenance, dingy rooms, tired beds and bathrooms, lumpy pillows and damp, sticky carpets threatening to crawl out on their own. While the chain hotels can be impersonal and anonymous, the newer offerings from Hilton (Tru), Marriott (Springhill and Towne Place) and even the usually dowdy Best Westerns can be surprisingly funky and fun. Apart from these innovators though, brown is still the colour of choice, for furniture, carpets, wallpaper and bedspreads. Price is no guide to quality with some of the best less than $100/night and mediocre ones for $250 (plus taxes - why is tax treated as a non-optional extra in the US; WYSIWYP [what you see is what you pay] seems an unfathomable concept for most Americans). Most rooms have fridges, coffee machines, microwaves and usually a separate sink which is ideal for a simple meal and a surprising number have car chargers. Fortunately they are beginning to improve the quality of their breakfast offerings, although the extent of waste generated by their widespread use of disposable paper plates, cups, bowls and plastic cutlery and glasses is bordering on criminality. A few are starting to be more responsible, with reusable tableware and eliminating all those wasted soap and plastic shampoo bottles and sachets but they are far from yet being the majority.
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| Fort Bluff |
But back to the journey, and back to Bluff in southern Utah. Joseph Smith is all pervasive, with most non first nations’ settlements in this part of the world attributed to his influence. If only he could’ve remembered where he buried those golden plates. The hardy Mormon souls struggled through canyons and cliffs, snow, cold and burning sun to find their patch of desert, their trek including lowering their wagons down sheer cliffs and hoisting them back up again on the other side without so much as a “hasa diga eebowai”, or even an autopilot. It’s an awe inspiring, surreal, brutal landscape of bare rock, looming peaks and sage bush and it gets more and more impressive as we journey west. We stop at the Gooseneck state park where the San Juan River has carved through hundreds of metres of sandstone to create a series of deeply incised or entrenched meanders, and at Mexican Hat, (not to be confused with Medicine Hat we passed in Alberta many moons before) where the same river has left an amazing rock formation looking for all the world like a mexican in a poncho with an oversized hat balanced precariously on his head. Along an arrow-straight road, Monument Valley looms ahead like a painted western set. The spirits of John Wayne and John Ford roam large in these hills and monoliths but as we have been here before, in the snow and without today’s crowds, we don’t stop to join the Searchers. Eventually at sundown we arrive at Page, an oasis town founded in the 1950s with the creation of the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell on the Colorado River.
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| Gooseneck Bend, Utah |
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| Monument Valley |
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| Mexican Hat, UT |
The Grand Canyon calls the next morning. After hiking to Horseshoe Bend, another entrenched meander just outside Page, we stop for lunch and some fresh electrons at Cliff Dwellers lodge beneath the Vermillion Cliffs, reaching the North Rim in time for the more intrepid of the party to tackle the Bright Angel trail. Compared with the more touristy south rim of the Grand Canyon there are no crowds here and we sit on the terrace watching the sunset, the moon rise and the ever changing colours of the cliffs and sky. It’s a magical, peaceful experience as the shadows creep up from the valley thousands of feet below, the sky pales and drains of colour, the birds fall silent as the rocks turn amber and glow like coals and fade to black and then eventually bathed in silver from the moon. All too soon it’s time to go and head north to the night’s lodgings in Kanab 100km north. The drive through the dark national park is eerie, with ghostly white aspen trees standing against the black of the forest, silvery deer standing sentinel along the road and coming round one corner a massive Great Horned Owl, bigger than an eagle takes off languidly from the middle of the road.
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| Horseshoe Bend |
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| Navajo Bridge, Az |
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| Sunset, Grand Canyon |
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| North Rim, Grand Canyon |
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| North Rim, Grand Canyon |
From Kanab it’s a short drive to Zion National Park which we previously visited in the dark. Traffic through the park is heavy today so we stop to walk to the Canyon Overlook trail, a steep climb to the top of a cliff face which provides a spectacular view down into Zion Canyon a thousand feet below. We take the shuttle bus through the canyon (no private cars allowed) and join the hordes on the riverwalk between towering cliffs to the head of the canyon which gets narrower and narrower. We are lucky to see a fledgling Californian Condor, a critically endangered bird of which there are less than 500 in the wild or in captivity. It’s the largest land bird in North America and possibly the ugliest although in flight it is majestic. Apparently the condor became extinct in the wild in 1987, when the 27 remaining birds were captured for a breeding program and subsequently have started to be reintroduced to the wild. Our little critter, unable yet to fly was perched on a ledge about 100m above the road, attended by its parents soaring off to find food.
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| Zion National Park, UT |
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| Zion Canyon, UT |
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| Zion National Park, UT |
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| Zion National Park, UT |
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| Fledgling Californian Condor, Zion |
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| Zion National Park, UT |
From Zion we head down from the mountains to the incredibly aptly named city of Hurricane, where it is literally blowing a hurricane, with the wind reaching gusts of 60mi/h. It’s a difficult drive through blinding sand and tumbleweed, garbage bins and all sorts of airborne debris. The following day we cut across through Las Vegas, stopping only at the slots for a charge and across the barren Mojave desert. Accompanied by the sounds of U2 we drive through the Joshua Tree National Park to Palm Springs. PS as it’s known is a fun, slightly retro but increasingly hip town with a vibrant arts scene, great restaurants and lots of live music venues. Unfortunately it’s only an overnight stop but we manage to fit in a visit to the shops and to the surprisingly good PS Art Museum which has an interesting glass sculpture collection featuring a large proportion of Australasian artists (who knew that Australia is a leading centre for glass artistry?). It also happens to have a supercharger nearby and is an easy drive via the hairpin/switchback of the Pines to Palms Highway to our dinner engagement with friends Trish and Steve in Carlsbad before they embark on their voyage to Australia.
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| Las Vegas supercharger |
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| Solar charging station, CA/NV border |
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| Palm Springs |
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| Palm Springs Art Museum |
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| Welcome to Palm Spring |
So after 5 months and 32,000 km we return to the Pacific coast near San Diego, the place where the car which has transported us around the entire continent came from. The car sadly is being sold in a couple of days in LA, so we spend the weekend cleaning and polishing and taking out all the crap. It’s amazing just how much accumulates on a road trip, particularly when you have both a trunk and a frunk. The latter is our larder and wine cellar, the former our, mobile closet, shoe rack and wardrobe, whilst the back seat is the library full of now redundant road atlases and brochures. Fortunately the car when emptied scrubs up pretty well, with no marks, scapes or dents or dings despite the rugged journey it’s been through. During that time it’s conveyed us effortlessly and largely automatically to the furthest corners of the continent from Cape Flattery in the west to Cape Spear in the east, on freeways, parkways, byways and forest tracks, through 24 states and 11 territories, 19 national parks, on and off 17 ferries, across 2,500m snowy mountain passes, through searing deserts and hurricanes, even down to 70m below sea level.
In that distance it has consumed 5800 kWh of electricity or an average of 179W/km, and emitted zero amounts of CO2, sulphur, nitrous oxide or other pollutants. Of course the electricity we used had to be generated but a good proportion of that, particularly in the western states and Canada, comes from solar, wind and hydro. Interestingly our running costs for the entire journey including all our electricity, maintenance and repairs total a princely $5.75.
Back in LA we meet with the new owner, sign all the paperwork, say a fond farewell to our chariot and head into the hills above Malibu to chill out on an avocado farm for a few days whilst we contemplate the next adventure.
Back on the mainland we cut west towards Charlotte, where we catch up with friend Emily who shows us the sights of her attractive city, with its museums, art installation, its cafes and breweries. 
There’s a TV news item about the Albuquerque balloon festival so we hightail it down the highway to see thousands of hot air balloons of all shapes and sizes take to the skies in the biggest display of its kind anywhere in the world. 
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