Kang's Thoughts

We stayed at our cousin’s place in AirDrie as he and his wife are both retired. We arrived at around 8pm on September the 18th. cousin Eddie was kind enough to slap something simple for us to eat. His rendition of the soya sauce based ribs was perfect with the steam rice that I had. At this point on the road trip, I have not had any rice for many, many days!

The next day we went to the CrossIron Mills Mall in Airdrie. This gives an opportunity for the girls to do some shopping while I can charge at the Tesla Supercharger that is located around the parking lots of the mall. When I got to the mall, I was surprised that it was full, and I had to queue up for a charge. After waiting for about 30 minutes, I got a stall that only gave me about 29kW. This was the slowest super charger experience yet on our road trip. The Flo fast DC charger that were next to the super chargers was faster, giving us 50kW. To make the experience worst, upon a thorough research, this was the only super charger station near Calgary! Anyone planning to drive to Calgary with a Tesla should be advised to get their vehicle charged up prior to entering the city. I gave up with the super chargers, and decided to just charge our Tesla at our cousin’s house at a measly 1kW. This means one day of plug in will only give us about 30% of charge. We didn’t do a lot of driving around town, so this worked as long as we leave the car plugged in all the time.

On the 19th, we went to cousin Rob’s place for dinner. He and his wife cooked a superb meal for us. The meat was tender and delicious, and the dinner rolls were like candy. After one, you immediately want another. It was good to catch up with them.

On the 20th, Eddie’s wife made some wonderful blueberry pancakes for us with accompanying bacon and sausages. This meal was a carb bonanza! The pancakes tasted better than my wife’s cooking. I made sure that she got the recipe. On the same evening, we went to the Modern Steak restaurant. Even though it was a steak house, and I had the Black Angus Filet, the most memorable for me were the oysters on the sea food platter. The crème brûlée also imprinted a lasting impression in my mind.

On the 21st, we woke up with some delicious pastries from La Table Haute Pastry in Airdrie. These were compliments from our cousin’s daughter and her husband. What left a real impression was the delightful almond croissant. There are no words to describe its taste. For me it was heavenly and perhaps even life changing!

Later on, we drove downtown and visited Shiki Menya Ramen for a late brunch. I had the squid ink soup, and its special savoury flavour made me want to just breathe in the ramen. Their portion was large enough that we were all stuffed. Their gyoza were also very tasty. However, in the end I had an after taste of garlic and a dying thirst for the rest of the day.

We had walk off our fullness at the Market Mall and a short visit to a local Costco for some light shopping. The garlicky flavour was alleviated by another helping of pastry from La Table when we got home. That same night we had another get together with Rob and his wife at the The Nash. It was another great opportunity to be with good company and enjoy some excellent food, especially my lamb shoulder that was cooked to perfection.

On our final full day in Calgary, the 22nd, we took our drone out to do some flying around Eddie’s gorgeous neighbourhood that was surrounded by canals lined with parallel walking paths. We use those same paths, to frequent a local Crumbl Cookies. These cookies were packed with sugar, excellent for an apocalyptic sugar rush. On our last evening in Calgary we had a super delicious meal at Ferraro Truly Italian. I had a spaghetti dish, but the pizza appetizer was out of this world. They made all their pasta and dough fresh when ordered.

This morning we bid our farewell to Calgary and our cousins on the morning of the 23rd as we head out Banff to checkout some of god’s fine landscaping. We really, really appreciated and grateful for both of our cousins to be able to share their time and residence with us. The time that we had was memorable and both Carol and I were glad that we made the trip out here to Calgary.

It is too bad that we have to make our U-Turn here, and not Vancouver or Victoria on Vancouver Island, as we must make our way back to Toronto for a wedding in October. Sorry cousin Melissa for not be able to make a visit this time around. I am pretty sure there will be a next time though.

Here is a video curated and edited by Carol on the four days that we spent in Calgary.

While at Moose Jaw, we stayed at Temple Gardens Hotel & Spa. Carol did a dip in the hot springs pool and she claimed that the mineral water really helped her psoriasis. The morning breakfast buffet was delicious along with the accompanying, friendly service.

After breakfast, we visited the Tunnels of Moose Jaw, before heading off on our final leg to Calgary. There were three tunnel tours, but we picked the one associated with the Cold War. The 45 minutes guided tour brings you back to the 1950’s of the Cold War era where facilities in Moose Jaw was used to trained NATO and 5 EYES spies. They also talked about how the Canadian government at that time surveil social (leftest) politicians from Saskatchewan thinking that they were potential communist spies.

Our final drive to Calgary was largely uneventful other than that Medicine Hat was a much bigger town than I original thought. The final charging stop was in the middle of nowhere with just an accompanying Subway restaurant. At each charging stop, three in total on this trip, our new Windex cleaning process seems to be working with the bug infested windshields.

Just as we approach the outskirts of Calgary, the sky opened up as if the city was rolling out the “yellow carpet” for us. Check out the stunning pictures below.

As a bonus the car was washed with heavy rain fall just before reaching the city boundary.

Below is Carol’s video of the day:

This morning we had another Tim Horton’s breakfast with a 7am rise and setting out at around 8:30am after a 30min charge near the Tesla Superchargers at Polo mall.

I had to take a little detour to pick up a used stereo amplifier that I purchased, the SMSL DA9. I was looking for a balanced XLR input amplifier for my bedroom and this came up on Canuck Audio Mart. Hopefully it will sound good, but I will not be able to test it until I get home at the end of the month.

The above pickup was about a 30 minute detour, but we had beautiful weather for our 6 hours drive to Moose Jaw. The straight roads, clear skies, and Tesla Auto Pilot made the journey pleasant and relaxing.

There was an interesting Co-op stop in the middle of nowhere at Whitewood, Saskatchewan.

About 50 km from Moose Jaw, the Tesla auto wipers started to act up. I think it is the dead bugs build up on the windshield, and disoriented the front cameras that doubles as the rain sensor. I will have to wash the windscreen tomorrow morning before we set out again.

Another thing I noticed is that Saskatchewan highways had the speed markers too far to the right of the road. In a few cases, the Tesla failed to pickup the speed limit which was 110 kph, it instead erroneously assumed 80 kph. This impacted the cruise control until I applied a 30 kph offset in the Auto Pilot menu. If I did not have this offset, the car will revert back to 80 kph and I will be experiencing phantom breaking when cruising at 120 kph. Of course, this is a bit dangerous if there is a car following you too closely.

We had a nice Chinese dinner at James Chinese Restaurant, which is about a 5 minutes walk from our hotel. The food was okay, and when you are hungry, anything tastes good. Nonetheless, I will go back again.

After dinner we took a nice stroll towards Crescent Park. Here are some photos that we took.

Tomorrow we are going to visit the Tunnels of Moose Jaw, and then straight on to Calgary. We were going to goto Edmonton, but I think we’ll hit Edmonton on the way back, the same with Regina.

Carol’s video of the day is below.

Today’s drive is our longest yet. We checked out of our AirBnB, and proceeded to a charge station to top up or batteries. This took about 30 minutes. Afterwards, we helped ourselves to a bagel breakfast to go at Tim Hortons. We ended up starting our journey at around 7am.

Today we actually crossed time zones from Eastern to Central, so we actually gained an hour.

The drive was uneventful and we are learning to stop at Supercharging stations at towns or cities with big populations so that there is either a Walmart or some big restaurant row.

There are two things which I find are critical assets for these long drives. The first is a good audio book, and the second is Tesla’s Autopilot / Auto Steering features. Both of these make the hours go by quick.

As usual, Carol’s video of the day gives a better experience than my wordy blog here.

Last night we stayed at the Quattro Hotel in Sault Ste. Marie. I really liked this hotel. Carol got her swimming in using their indoor pool, and we also got some laundry done with their guest laundry facilities. The place also came with complimentary breakfasts with real eggs and sausages!

We started our drive at 11am to Thunder Bay. The first half of the trip was met with beautiful weather. Northern Ontario has some really nice sceneries. We also got a bonus view, with some of the trees already changing into their fall colours.

The second half of the drive was pretty dangerous. It got super foggy on the highway, and we could not see more than 30 to 50 meters in front of us. It was like this for about 300 km. At our last charging stop, we had to use the GPS to guide us to get there.

After about three charge stops and numerous washroom breaks, at around 8pm we finally arrived at Thunder Bay. To our disappointment, most restaurants closed at 9pm here, so we settled for something simple, like McDonald’s for dinner.

Tonight we are staying at another AirBnB place. A very nice one bedroom suite with our own washroom. The host, Dawna was very nice and waited for our arrival. The room has a very “family” feel to it. It is as though we are staying with relatives.

Tomorrow, we plan to start early to Winnipeg.

Carol’s video is worth a million of my words, so here it is.

Today we began or journey to Sault Ste. Marie. We start from Tobermory by hopping on the Chi-Cheemaun Ferry. The ferry ride itself accommodates mostly vehicles, such as cars, motorbikes, various recreational vehicles, vans, etc. I was impressed at how many vehicles it was able to carry in a single trip. There must have been 40 to 50 vehicles easily.

Driving into the ferry was also interesting, as there is two levels. The main level for vehicles that require extra height and motorbikes. The second level consists of mostly regular cars and SUV’s.

The ferry took us to South Baymouth where we had our first road trip incident with our Tesla Model Y. Because the car was transported with the ferry, it lost its GPS position and had to reacquire the signal when we get off the ferry. Well, that is how it is suppose to work. The GPS signal was acquired, but the software map on the main dash failed to update the “current position”.

We tried the following to no avail:

• Rebooting the dash;
• Powering off and on with both a 3 minutes and 5 minutes wait;
• Called Tesla support and they suggested the same with a final recommendation to drive to a Tesla Service Centre!

I am totally blown away that such a software glitch can exists on a Tesla. The fix probably just require a recycling of the GPS module. Unfortunately, there is no user-friendly way of doing this.

We gave up on our troubleshooting and drove from South Baymouth to Sault Ste. Marie without the Tesla navigation app. This is more of a handicap than I thought. The car fails to precondition the battery when we arrive at the supercharger so it takes a little longer to charge. We also miss the mapping functionality that tells us the locations of the on-route superchargers and how many were available. Good old Waze on our iPhone to the rescue, and some manual range calculations.

When we arrived at our hotel at Sault Ste. Marie, and with the help of the hotel Internet, I finally “risked” a software update on our Tesla. I had to use my iPhone’s personal hotspot and download the new software update for the Tesla. With fingers crossed and 30 minutes of unwanted and undesirable anxiety, the update downloaded successfully. Another bare knuckles 30 minutes wait, we were rewarded with a correct map and location on the dash once more!

The moral of the story is, when taking a long road trip, DO NOT transport the Tesla other than under its own power. Lesson learned! Those who are planning on taking a road trip, I highly recommend that you avoid ferries and trains that can transport your Tesla.

Tomorrow, we are off to Thunder Bay with a functional navigation system again.

Here is Carol’s video for the day.