Kang's Thoughts

Today is the last leg of our journey. I have driven almost 8,200km, and we have successfully drove our Tesla Model Y from Richmond Hill, Ontario to Calgary. Jasper being the furthest point from home.

As with most of our days, we started off with the hotel offered breakfast, and then we set about our ways on the road. Since we did the outbound trip via the ferry from Tobermory, most of this stretch (anything East of Espanola) will be new to us. The speed limit increased from the meagre 90kph to 110kph in the Northern portion of Highway 400. This was of course a pleasant surprise.

We also stopped at our first Tesla Supercharging station at Port Severn that look like a really well thought out rest stop for both EV and regular gasoline vehicles.

The major let down of the whole trip was that on the previous night, unbeknownst to me, I accidentally unplugged our portable fridge and all the delicious Mackay’s Ice Cream that we purchased in Alberta were all melted. Ruined on the last leg!

Lesson learned. Always check the temperature of the fridge when entering the vehicle.

This concludes our road trip. I will be doing another post on the charging statistics in a separate post.

Here is Carol’s video account of our day.

Today was a pretty tiring drive. Tiring yes, but at least this time it was not foggy like the outbound trip to Calgary. We can actually take in some of the beautiful lookouts of Lake Superior. Unfortunately, the nice scenery did not shorten the long trip. It felt forever before we arrived at Sault Ste. Marie.

However, as we get closer to Sault Ste. Marie, the trees begin to catch the autumn fires! The red orangey colours were pretty spectacular and wide spread.

I also miss the Supercharger stations in the prairies and Alberta. They were always close to a Walmart or a Tim Horton’s. The Supercharger stations in Ontario are in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes a washroom is hard to find around the station. The gas stations wants you to be a customer, so I just offer to by a $5 LottoMax ticket. Perhaps this washroom tax will have some anti-karma, lucky benefits.

Tonight we stuck with something simple, like Subway for dinner. We did get a chance to walk around the local mall called Station Mall. The pandemic really hit this city hard. The mall only had about 50% occupancy. Poor Sault Ste. Marie!

I got a double scoop Laura Secord ice cream cone while Carol got some New York Fries for some added dinner snacks.

Carol’s record of today’s tiring drive.

This is going to be a pretty short summary. We are back in Ontario today! It is nice to be amongst Ontario plates again!

The flat land gave away to gentle hills as we roll into Thunder Bay. We hope to catch some restaurants open this time. Last time, most restaurants were closed by 8pm! This time we thought we found one that closes at 9pm, but as we got closer to the city we called our designated restaurant named Lucky’s, and were somewhat disappointed to find out that they close their dinning room at 8pm, and it is take-out only service during their last hour. The owner told us that if we make it by 7:30pm, we can be served. We got there at 7:25pm, just made it to order some Thai and Vietnamese dishes! If we did not make it in time, it would be some fast food joint again.

Another interesting fact, it looks like Tesla raised their Superchargers pricing during our road trip. On our way to Calgary, we were only paying around $0.47 to $0.49 per kWh. It looks like the $0.60 per kWh is not an Alberta thing. Here in Ontario, the current prices now ranges from $0.59 to $0.60 per kWh. I wonder if Tesla adjust the pricing based on actual oil market price.

Carol’s video of our mundane transition from Manitoba to Ontario.

We did a Tim Hortons bagel breakfast this morning while we charge our car to start our drive to Winnipeg.

To combat the monotonous nature of these drives, I started an interesting practice yesterday, and I continue to practice it today.

I started to download the audio stream (no video) of some of the YouTube channels that I have been following as part of my day-to-day doom-scrolling activity. These audio streams are stored on my NAS server at home, where I create my own podcast feed (podcast.lufamily.ca), which can be accessed using the Overcast iOS App. Now I can get my daily dose of international news, propaganda, and individual opinions.

Our Tesla Model Y front is continuously battered by bugs, pebbles, and small stones as we cross the warm and windy prairies. We have been fairly lucky to escape any major damages, until today when our windshield became a casualty. There is a very nice star like crack on the lower passenger side of the windshield. I guess after about 6,000km and passing endless gravel trucks, this is not that uncommon, but still a bummer. We’ll get this sorted once we get back home.

Today’s trip is not all bad. We found Sun Fortune Restaurant, opened by a Hong Kong expat, serving the Chinese community here in Winnipeg for more than 20 years. My cravings for Chinese food and especially RICE has been satisfied tonight!

Checkout Carol’s video and be sure to watch to the end for the scrumptious Cantonese dishes we had tonight.

We started the morning with a very hearty breakfast at Denny’s, which was located near a local truck stop. I can’t lie, the breakfast was delicious and the Philly Cheese Steak Omelette was pretty tasty and satisfying.

We set out to Regina. It was a super windy day. The drive itself was pretty uneventful other than the fact that we had to charge at every Tesla Supercharge station from Edmonton to Regina. The open land and the wind really took a toll on our efficiency and therefore our range. Our total charge cost turned out to be $88.79. Adding salt to injury for some reason it costs more here, $0.60/kWh instead of $0.47/kWh from Ontario. I am beginning to think that Alberta does not like electric vehicles. The price is still reasonable considering that we covered more than 700km.

Nonetheless I cannot fault the Supercharging Network. We had no problems charging the car and there were plenty of available chargers. Knock on wood, but we have not had to line up during our trip save the time when we were in the big Crossiron Mall in Calgary.

The silver lining to all the stops, was that we got my wife, Carol, a Series 9 Apple Watch. We found a Best Buy at Lloydminster, Alberta. This is literally the last town before exiting Alberta and onto Saskatchewan. As a matter of fact, the border is within the town itself. Once again, we are delighted to take advantage of the lack of provincial sales tax in Alberta.

The sky was clear and on our drive into Regina we had a beautiful sunset to our right, while the moon welcome us into Regina on the horizon. We checked into our hotel, and I was on a hunt for some Chinese food. Unfortunately it seems like all Chinese restaurants in Regina closes on Tuesday. Just our luck! Instead, we settled for some Vietnamese Pho and sandwiches, both were delicious (maybe it’s our hunger speaking).

Once again Carol’s video is worth way more than my words.

We left Jasper in the morning after a relaxing breakfast at the Forest Park hotel. If we were to stay in Jasper again, we should probably pick a weekday instead of a weekend. The prices of the hotels during the weekend is doubled. In hindsight this is probably obvious, but our schedule just happens to land us in Banff and Jasper on the weekend. Most of the stores close after Thanksgiving, and the scenic highway 93 from Banff to Jasper also closes as it becomes harder to maintain during the winter storms.

After about 50km East of Jasper we left the Jasper National Park. It is phenomenal that when we left the park, so did the picturesque view of the mountains, and the skies become dominant again on the horizon.

Today was not a long drive. We left Jasper at around 10:30am, and we got to Edmonton at about 2:30pm. We charged in a small town called Edson. We took the extra time to visit West Edmonton Mall and just so happened to frequent an Apple Store and picked up their last iPhone 15 Pro in inventory. What luck! Also being in Alberta we pay less HST, 9% less than Ontario.

Found 100°C Tea House Cafe, and I was dying for some Chinese food, not as good as Toronto, but beggars cannot be choosers.

Checked into Sandman Signature Sherwood Park Hotel by the Suncor refinery. Best hotel for the buck yet. Tomorrow we drive to Regina.

Carol’s video of the day is below.

Our first difficulty of today was getting up at around 5:30am. Carol got up at this time while I took another 15 minutes. We did a quick remote checkout and hop in the car and went straight to Lake Louis. The idea is to get there before 7am so that we can park right at the lake.

Mission accomplished! We managed to park at the lower parking lot by the lake. Did the mandatory touristy thing by taking selfies and pictures around the lake and decided to hike up to Mirror Lake which is about 2.5km of incline hiking. We did not have it in us to keep on going to Lake Agnes, as that is another 800m. These are one way distances so we have to double distances for our round trip. All in all we did a 6km hike today.

Below are some pictures from Lake Louis, you can click the picture to show the full size.

The drive North on Hwy 93 was very picturesque! The sun came out in the second half of our drive. We stopped once at one of the lookout stops, but Carol mostly took videos while in the car. We passed the glass floor bridge, because our impression was it was super small and not worth our while.

We ended up in Jasper just in time to charge back our Tesla to 80% and have lunch, which we did at the Mad Grizzly on Patricia Street. Once again the food was okay, but we were hungry.

If we were to do it again, we would probably skip Banff and travel from Calgary, with a 5am departure and go direct to Lake Louis, with a quick charge in Canmore, and on the same day go straight to Jasper. There was a non-Tesla charger station mid-route from Lake Louis to Jasper, which we could have topped up with our CCS adapter.

I am super tired now and the rest of today will be vegging-out in the hotel room. Tomorrow we plan to do another hike in the area and off to West Edmonton Mall.

Here is Carol’s video for the day.

After our light breakfast on September the 23rd, we set out to Banff.

The hotels at Banff on a Saturday is super expensive, but hey we are here already, so we bit the bullet and made the reservation at the Banff Park Lodge Resort on Lynx Street. Our planning involved more than just the booking at Banff. We also needed to figure out how to get to Lake Louis, and whether there are enough charging stations to Jasper.

We charged up our vehicle to 93% before we set out on our journey. We made an ice cream stop at Mackay’s Ice Cream in Cochrane. We purchased a couple of flavours to go, and also got a cup for immediate tasting. The ice cream was delicious but we still prefer the Kawartha Ice Cream brand at home.

We stopped at Canmore to charge our car again to around 95% and debated whether we should eat lunch there or just head to Banff. We decided on the latter because there was an Una Pizza in Banff that we wanted to check out. Ferraro’s pizza was better because of the fresh dough.

For dinner we visited The Bistro Restaurant on Bear Street. The food was “okay”. The Nash was better in Calgary.

All in all I think it will be a long time before I visit Banff again. It was simply too touristy for me.

As it turned out we could have skipped Canmore and not charge at all, because there is a destination charger at the hotel which we topped up to around 95% again. Tomorrow morning at 6am we will be ready to head to Lake Louis and then straight to Jasper without further charging. Fingers cross and hope we have enough charge with all the hilly terrain.

Carol’s video for the day: