For those of you not in the bay area, Mines Rd is a rather remote stretch of highway in the east bay. (One of the only roads I've seen with its own
page of Yelp reviews.) For a map, see
here.
A friend and I left Livermore at about 2 PM Saturday with the goal of at least making it to the Junction -- an excellent roadhouse bar in the middle of nowhere, if you are into roadhouse bars in the middle of nowhere. We successfully navigated the 1-(total)-lane-at-times road roughly 30 miles south (arriving at about 57% SOC) . . . to discover that none of the exterior outlets at the restaurant were functional. They'd either just not power anything, or the charger's 'Power Fault' light would turn on and no juice would go to the bike. After much talking and explanation to the owners/operators of the Junction, they all of a sudden seemed fairly excited about installing some kind of charging station out there.
After spending a couple hours eating delicious buffalo burgers and answering questions for the requisite small crowd of curious folk, we decided to head back to Livermore as it was getting pretty late. If I'd been able to charge there we probably would have headed on through to San Jose, but I didn't want to risk it. The other plan was to charge at the top of Mt. Hamilton, which has the
Lick Observatory at the top of it (and according to some Leaf drivers is EV-friendly), but it was getting fairly late. One of these upcoming weekends I'm going to tackle it again and see if I can do the entire loop.
I did make it back to Livermore with about 18% left!
