Big Henry was sleeping as the sun came up in Woodinville, WA.

He woke up and threw off his blankets.  “I’m going to have a great day today.  In fact, I’m going to have a great BIG day!”, he said.

“But first, I think I need a big breakfast.  I wonder what Bubbie is going to have”, he thought.  Soon Bubbie started making a smoothie with all kinds of delicious ingredients. She used banana, avocado and other yummy things.  Big Henry thought that might taste good.  He offered to help Bubbie make the smoothie.

It was delicious!  Big Henry “cheers’ed” with Bubbie and they both drank their smoothies.

After breakfast Big Henry wanted to play with his friends.  He asked Caitlin if she wanted to plan Connect 4.  He was excited when she said yes!

Big Henry should be careful, Caitlin might win this game!

Bubbie asked Big Henry if he wanted to watch the construction workers do their jobs. He did!  So Bubbie got him a comfy chair and he sat on the porch watching the work.

In the afternoon, Big Henry asked Opa to turn on the TV so he and his friends could watch a show.

Do you see what program they watched?

Then Big Henry, Bubbie and Opa had dinner.  Afterward Big Henry was very sleepy.  It was time for bed.  Bubbie read him a story.  Then she pulled his blanket up over his shoulders and he drifted off to sleep.  He had the most wonderful dreams about his big day!

We’ve had the car for a bit more than a week.  It got to Boise on the 6th.  I got down there on the 8th to drive it and pay for it.  Without any real-world numbers on miles/kWh or charging rates, I planned a route for brining it home, a trip of about 500 miles.  It would have been a fun adventure.  Other family issues made us re-think our need and capacity for adventure at that time.  So we shipped the car home.

It arrived on the 16th.  We have about three hundred miles on the odometer and have charged twice at home and once on a public DC charger.

The car says it is getting 3.1 km per kWh.  That’s 1.9 miles per kWh and the car can, in theory, spit out 76 kWh before calling it good.  That suggests the range on 80 percent of a full battery is 146 miles.  That’s way off the advertised 204 miles and the 212 miles the car says it has on a full battery.  We need more time to sort out the real range of this thing.

We have a two 240V, 40A circuits in the garage with NEMA 14-50 receptacles.  The car’s charging unit fits that receptacle.  Technically, the ‘gizmo’ they give you is called an EVSE, electric car supply equipment.  The charger is in the car.  The ESVE has a NEMA plug on one side and a J1772 connector on the other.  It has control electronics that keep everyone safe while charging and not charging.

The circuit we have should charge the car at 9.6 kWh.  But we only get 4.4 kWh.  That means a full charge should take around 25 hours, much longer than the 9 hours Audi advertises.  I did notice the ESVE says “50%”, which is close to 4.4 kWh.  I just can’t find any switch to make it work at 100%!

Today I charged at a 50 kWh DC EVgo station at the local shopping center.  I was able to charge from 57% to 95% in 42 minutes.  My math says that’s 36.1 kWh, but the charger says it delivered 35.3 kWh.  Close enough.  That’s 0.84 kWh per minute or 50 kWh per hour.  At that rate, a full (20% to 100%) charge should take 90 minutes.  A 150 kWh charger should be almost three times faster.

The cost of the 50 kWh charger, for 35 kWh was $13.40.  That’s roughly 20 cents per mile.  At $4/gal, my Q7 costs about the same to operate.  The lesson here is — charge at home!

Bottom line

On the highway, two hours of driving will take you about 150 miles and run your battery down to twenty percent.  It will take about thirty minutes to recharge that if you can find 150 kWh charger, 90 minutes otherwise.

Around town, the same 150 miles will take you two to three days in the suburbs and will require 17 hours to refill.  It’s probably best to charge every night.

Overall impressions of the car

We love it!  It’s super comfortable, luxurious actually.  It drives well, is fast enough and handles nicely.  The audio is good.  Features are outstanding, it’s fully loaded.  (We have the Edition One.)  You do feel like you are driving the future of automobiles.

Negatives include CarPlay (which is flaky as heck), no user manuals and slow charging at home.

We need to find a 150 kWh charger and get more real-world mileage before we take a road trip.  Spokane is a common destination for us.  We see ElectrifyAmerica will have a 150 kWh charger on that route soon.  But there is nothing high-speed near family in Spokane.  So we can get there, but will need a long time to charge enough to get back to the high-speed charger.  For now, this is an around-town car.  But a really, really nice one!

Still fooling around with tools that help edit and manage the blog.

Testing yet another desktop application to support blog post authoring.  This time it’s the Mac OS X application from WordPress.com.  We’ll see…

From the start of this blog until just recently, we’ve used Windows Live Writer to maintain this blog. It’s a small program, from Microsoft, that boils Word down to a lightweight blog editor. It has good support for WordPress. Naturally it runs on Windows, which was not a problem for us. But in 2012 we switch to using a Mac while traveling (and while not traveling as well.) Until recently we used Parallels to run Windows so we could run Windows Live Writer. (That’s an $80 program to run a free program.)

Recently we discovered TypeMetal from Coherence Labs. It’s a dedicated HTML editor with great support for blogging. It syncs nicely with WordPress. And it’s Mac-native making the whole process a lot easier. We found an issue between TypeMetal and our WordPress hosting company that made complete syncing iffy. Troy from Coherence researched the issue, contacted the hosting company and came up with both a short-term (today) and on-going solution. Thanks Troy! So far so good with TypeMetal!

BTW, we also switch WordPress tempates. This template, Kubrick 2014, is responsive, which means it should look better on your phone than the old template.

On Tuesday we spent time on Long Island before driving back to Massachusetts.

There is a particular tree in the front yard of the house where the sisters (and one brother) grew up; every grandchild gets their photo taken hugging that tree.  The grand daughter is a little too young to hug the tree.  So…

The tree is the one to the left in this photo:

Later we visited the convalescence home and got this picture of Dad and daughter.

Afterward  we tried hard to convince our grand daughter that she has the worst grandparents on the planet.  We did this by taking eight hours to make a four hour drive.  It wasn’t all our fault; we faced road closures, traffic and a serious accident (not to us).  But we also left late, had a work emergency, made an extra stop, etc.

Overall the little girl handled things as well as you could expect.  She’s a… wait for it…. a troopah!

This is her with her great aunt, whom we visited with today.

There is an old line someone might use about a fast car saying “It can pass everything but a gas station.”

Well now our chariot can’t even pass a gas station!  About 110 miles out of Santa Fe we stopped in Wagon Mound, New Mexico for gasoline.  Not too many miles after that we had a “Hybrid failure” warning and lost the electric motors.  But we still had the gasoline engine working.  We slowed down a bit and kept on toward Santa Fe.  About ten or so miles out we got a “Failed generator” error message and the A/C cut off.  After that the car failed to accelerate or even downshift.  And then the brakes got spongy.  We basically limped into the hotel parking lot.

After consulting with dealers in both Washington and Albuquerque,  it sounds like the hybrid control unit has failed.  Dealers don’t normally stock them.  We’ll find out tomorrow if the local (well, 62 miles away) dealer can fix it by Monday.  They will take the car on a flatbed in the morning and bring us a loaner. 

Other than that, it was a nice day.  We had 420 miles to go and it went by pretty quickly.  We made short stops and good speed, once we got out of Colorado.

While in Boulder in the AM we found a great breakfast place, called the Buff, with excellent gluten free pancakes.  Overall we found Boulder to be (gluten free) Good Eats!

It’s hot in New Mexico but we are looking forward to seeing Taos, Los Alamos and Santa Fe.  It will be nice to have a few consecutive nights in one place!

Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas has a new Starbucks.  This is the price list…

Three years ago we must have packed and carried twenty pounds of technology on our Excellent Adventure to Europe. This year we will pack and carry less, but in fact have more technology at our fingertips. It would be even more so if our cell phones worked in Europe. But alas, we have Verizon, which is great in North America, but non-operational anywhere else.

Last time we carried a 5.5 pound computer; this year a far better machine is less than three pounds. Last time we took a backup hard drive and a DVD burner for additional backups. This year we will back up to the ‘cloud’.

The camera we took last time weighed several pounds. This year we are going to use a point-and-shoot with better resolution, a fair amount of manual control and several more features, including in-camera panoramas.

The computer is a Samsung 9. It has a solid-state disk (SSD) so it boots crazy fast. You can see the very large touch pad in the photo; so no mouse to carry. It runs Windows 7 and is effectively the Windows equivalent to the MacBook Air. The only complaint is that the touch pad is really, really sensitive. I’m frequently surprised to have made a mouse press when I did not mean to.

Aside from that, I love having the flip-it-open-and-use-it convenience MacBook users have.

We’ll use Dropbox for storing photo backups. If you don’t have Dropbox, get it. I can pop photos onto Dropbox and she can access them with her iPad. Or cell phone, except we won’t have our cell phones. As previously, we’ll publish some of our photos to Smugmug.

For a camera, we will be using a Sony DSC-H55. This camera takes great pictures and even does panoramas inside the camera.

The car will have satellite navigation, so the only bummer will be not having our cell phones. I think about how nice it would have been to have maps on a cell phone the last time we were exploring cities. A friend loaned us an unlocked Android phone. We’ll see if we can get a month-long voice and data plan from T-Mobile or one of the other European vendors.

So that’s it, fewer items, less weight and more functionality. I love technology!