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crumbling Electrify America
Wednesday, August 14 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Today Gretchen and I would be driving the Chevy Bolt down to the Watergate in Washington, DC, to see Gretchen's parents for the first time in close to two years. (The last time we'd seen them was when we rendezvoused in Baltimore to see a Randy Rainbow performance.) The plan was to leave at around 9:00am, and somehow we managed to do it. The dogs came with us initially, but we only took them as far as Ray and Nancy's house down in Old Hurley, where they joined a pack that already consisted of Jack and Ray's brother's little dog Hurricane. (The Watergate has rules against dogs larger than someone like Hurricane, so we've never been able to take our dogs there.)
When we drive the Bolt long distances, the route is dictated by the location of charging stations more than anything else. Gretchen found a seemingly well-placed Electrify America station near central Philadelphia in a strip mall at 1100 S Christopher Columbus Blvd, and it looked to be within walking distance of some of Philadelphia's many vegan restaurants. So that was the destination we punched into our navigation. When we got to that station, we found that there were a total of four chargers, only three of which were working (that's very normal at an Electrify America station). All tree working chargers were occupied, so we had to get in line (fortunately there was no one in front of us). Interestingly, there is no official queuing policy when it comes to waiting for a charger. The etiquette, such as it is, seems to be policed by the people who happen to be there. In the past, it's been rare for me to drive to an Electrify America station and find all the chargers occupied, but the number of non-Tesla electric cars on the road has been increasingly exponentially while the number of compatible fast chargers has not been increasing much at all, despite Joe Biden's successfully-passed infrastructure bill, with its promise of billions of dollars to build out electric car charging capacity. Meanwhile, Electrify America, the most widespread charging network for non-Tesla electric cars, seems to be crumbling from half-hearted maintenance. Fortunately, many of the newer electric cars on the road can fast-charge at several multiples of the speed of a Chevy Bolt, so we only had to wait about fifteen minutes before a charger became available and we could begin to charge.
Once that was going, we walked to a vegan café called Grindcore, which immediately seemed familiar, as we'd been there once before. It's the kind of place that plays exclusively hardcore from the stereo (there aren't many black or female voices in that) and the bathroom walls are covered in layers of graffiti, like CBGB's famously was. The food tends to be baked goods and vegan junkfood sandwiches. I got one of the latter, and it was big and delicious. (Gretchen got some sort of breakfast sandwich that triggered my egg aversion every time I caught a glimpse of it, even though it definitionally contained none.)
Back at the car, it looked to have enough electricity to get us the rest of the way, so Gretchen took over driving duties (I'd driven us to Philadelphia) and off we went. Unfortunately, we ran into numerous patches of congestion, and evidently traffic on the conventional routes as so bad that Google routed us down to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Nevertheless, we managed to get to the Watergate at about 5:20pm, which was ten minutes early. Gretchen's father had just gotten back from Costco, where he had bought an enormous amount of blueberries, among other things.
We weren't at the Watergate for long before the four of us went (in Gretchen's parents' all-electric Kona) out to our dinner reservation, a fancy restaurant called DC Vegan. There we rendezvoused with Gretchen's childhood friend Dina and her family (her parents and kids, though not her husband Gilaud, who had yet to arrive from Boston).
The main reason we'd come to DC was so Gretchen could see Dina, who lives in Tel Aviv these days, which is perhaps not the safest place to be living these days, especially since Iran is expected to retaliate any day for the assassination (by the Isrælis) of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. On some level, Gretchen thinks Dina's continued living in Isræl is madness bordering on child abuse (given that her two kids are approaching the age of mandatory military service), so she's hoping to better understand that or see evidence that Dina might be considering moving back to the United States. It would be one thing if Isræl were a stable democracy working towards some sort of accommodation with its neighbors, but under Netanyahu, the country has taken a hard-right illiberal turn and done nothing but antagonize its neighbors and the non-Jews in lands it controls, behavior that results in vicious cycles of retaliation and counter-retaliation. For Gretchen, Isræl is best left to the crazies; its status as a beacon of hope for a long-oppressed people is pretty much over.
I'd hoped to discuss my ESP8266 Remote Control system with Gretchen's father as the potential product of a business, and I thought that perhaps I could demonstrate its many features at the meal today. But all I had was my phone, and I'd done little to make it work well on a small screen, so it was hard to show off. I'd also hoped to maybe help Gretchen's father with perhaps remote controlling or at least monitoring his second home (an on-grid log cabin about an hour south of the Watergate along the lower Potomac), but he already had remote heating control with Nest. It's not really the same, but it's already set up and working.
As for the food tonight, I ordered the eggplant rollatini, which was pretty good. I also liked the mushroom-based "calamari," which was also a big hit with Dina's two kids. I wasn't paying, but the prices at DC Vegan were like those in New York or at the Bearsville Theatre. My Voodoo Rnager IPA (I was the only one who had an adult beverage) was $10, and my eggplant rollatini was $30.
After the meal, all of us went back to the Watergate for a dessert of cookies and such that Gretchen had made. At some point Dina's mother, who is very old and can barely hear anything despite her hearing aid, started talking about her various maladies, which were affecting one hip but that are now affecting the other. We'd try to chime in with questions or supportive statements, but she was too deaf to understand what we were saying. It made me wonder how she and Dina's father (who is a very spry 86) communicate enough to run a functioning household. But they're still living independently in Dina's childhood home back in Silver Spring.
The bathroom in Grindcore. CBGB with less cholera!
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CBGB with less cholera!
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CHOAD.
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Climbing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge from the east.
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Evidently they let cars go the other direction in that third lane depending on traffic conditions.
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Just about every style of bridge (except cable-stay) seems to have been used on this bridge.
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Cars heading towards a horizon lost in the haze.
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Up high so the big boats can get through.
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Where the bridge reaches the west shore of Chesapeake Bay.
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