Lightning charging in front of the Seawall Motel just after dawn
Odometer: 3520 miles

Sorry that it’s been a while since I updated this blog — I’ve been traveling on business so I haven’t been home to play with Lightning. However, our younger son David departed for University of Maine at Orono, ME last Friday, so we used this trip as an excuse to tour Mt. Desert Island and Acadia National Park in Lightning. The entire trip was roughly 600 miles, and, as one would hope, it went off without a hitch.

This trip was made a lot easier thanks to David and Vickie Lloyd, who run the Seawall Motel. Despite their being off the beaten path in Southwest Harbor instead of the more well-known Bar Harbor on Mt. Desert Island, they installed two Tesla destination chargers connected to a 100A circuit as well as a general purpose EV charger. The result was that we were able to supercharge at the Augusta, ME (so far the only supercharger in Maine), visit the UMaine campus, tour around Bar Harbor, and reach the Seawall with about 150 miles of charge left. We could then charge overnight there up to our full range of 284 miles (see the map below).

We highly recommend other Tesla owners stay at the Seawall. We plan to return to the Seawall during future trips to Maine. It is open year-round and David and Vickie run a warm, comfortable and clean property. Oh yeah, they like Tesla owners too; Dave noted that he has yet to meet one who didn’t seem like an interesting person.

On Saturday, we walked around the fabulous rocky beaches around the Seawall Motel, toured the island, and worked our way down Route 1 to Saco, ME to visit a relative. We then pressed on to the Seabrook supercharger and headed home. As you can see from the map above, we covered just about 254 miles from our overnight charge at the Seawall until we hit the Seabrook supercharger, arriving with 10% charge. While we had no official backup plan if our energy consumption had run higher than expected, we did observe several public chargers listed on Plugshare.com in places like York, ME and Portsmouth, NH that we could have stopped at if necessary.

Our conclusions from this trip:

1. Destination chargers are a big win. We wouldn’t have looked at the Seawall Motel if it hadn’t been flagged for us as having a destination charger. Further, if we hadn’t been able to charge at the Seawall, we would have had to hit the Augusta supercharger again on our way home. That would have required us to skip the first 75 miles or so down Route 1 or to have charged at some slower charging station. Having a destination charger allowed us to go where we wanted.
2. The Bangor supercharger will bring more Teslas to northern Maine attractions. A new supercharger at the Bangor Mall in Brewer ME will be operational in a matter of weeks if not days. That will make Acadia, Bar Harbor, and the Southwest Harbor accessible to more Teslas. In fact, that charger will allow Teslas with 85kWh batteries and up to do round trips to Mt. Katahdin, the most northern point on the Appalachian Trail. Bonus fun fact: When it becomes operational, the Bangor supercharger will be the easternmost supercharger in North America.
3. Range really isn’t a problem on this car. While we know there are places where no superchargers exist, there aren’t many places with no charging stations at all. Increasingly, we’re feeling like our Tesla is just like our other cars: we just pick up and go, and we will figure out where we will refuel along the way. Planning in advance optimizes the process and will save time, but we are finding that planning on the fly works just fine.