Thanks everyone for coming out to the 1st Annual Golden Spike Soirée at Fort Stockton, Texas almost exactly 150 years after the original event in Utah, and thanks especially to Charlie for making it happen. It’s one thing to have a harebrained idea 3 years ago, and quite another to successfully bring it to fruition. Very nicely done.
Ample media and local dignitaries were in attendance and the event made it into at least 2 newspapers beforehand - looking forward to seeing the post-event coverage. The Mayor very kindly drove the spike into the ground with Chamber leadership on hand.
As you can see from the above posts, we had not only a drone but a spherical camera which I’d say constituted a respectable showing of very cool technogeekery indeed.
It was great meeting each of you as we filled the site to capacity and then some. We had about 20 people altogether who signed in and came away with commemorative golden spikes. And was it 11 cars? That’s more than attended the 1st Sound of Silence Black Hills Tesla Rally in Custer, South Dakota in 2014 (now the 6th Annual coming up in May), which bodes well indeed! From a 3000-range VIN original owner to at least one 100K+ owner to another top-10 SC chaser, we were privileged to have quite the group of kind, interesting and motivated owners and enthusiasts. Tesla should be proud indeed - maybe they’ll surprise us and we’ll see a mention at tesla.com/blog later this month.
The Hotel Limpia in Fort Davis 90 miles down the road was stellar from end to end; built in 1912, it has quite the history and the staff and local guests were fantastic. Was very interesting to meet the local historian (whose mother, Charlie tells me, learned to drive in a Baker electric car 100+ years ago) as well as the resident hotel cat (Limpia, who clearly approved of our presence). The bar manager excelled at crafting both kinds of Golden Spikes (and then wore 2 more hats serving dinner *and* breakfast the next morning) and our chef was also attentive and fed us beyond well.
I had to duck out early the next morning for a ~20-hour run back to SoCal (~1030 miles including navigating on the fly around Quartzsite, which was 100% down again) for Monday meetings but the group pictures around town on Sunday look really good!
Hope to see everyone again at the August EVent along with those who couldn’t make it to this one.
About those idle fees - heh - no indication yet that any accrued, but it’ll be close - maybe not - can’t tell if the algorithm accounts for cars currently charging or just cars connected. I did get to Van Horn with a quite comfortable 12% the next morning, which meant that my 100% (S90D) from Fort Stockton was good for 191 actual miles (instead of 276 rated, down from 294 new). Not quite as bad as a week of urban short trips (a full charge gets me no more than 130-140 miles regularly when stuck in town), but I figured there’d be a hit between the wx, topography, and generous speed limits, and sure enough, there was.
