Not much to report today. Spent most of the day behind the wheel and plugged in at three Supercharger stations (Biloxi, Crestview, and Tallahassee). Clear weather, temps in the low 50s, moderate traffic. Didn’t get on the road until 9 and plugged in at the Supercharger station near our hotel at 6:40. Ate a Blaze Pizza (recommended – really hot oven; made-to-order pizza done in 5 minutes). In the room here in Tallahassee by 7:30. Ready for a 5-hour trip to Sun City Center in the morning, stopping for electrons in Ocala.
Our one sightseeing stop today was in Pascagoula, AL. No Revolutionary, Civil or Texas Independence wars fought here, as far as I know. There is said to be an historical marker, designating the spot of the Pascagoula Abduction. As you’ll recall, two fishermen from Pascagoula were abducted in October 1973 by aliens from a UFO that was spotted by numerous other people in the area. This event occurred only seven years after the famous UFO sighting in my hometown of Hillsdale, MI. Theories claiming that UFO sighting was in fact swamp gas have been dismissed by local observers.
Our real reason for visiting Pascagoula was to see the drilling ship that our Nephew Chris Hempstead is working on. No, he isn’t scraping barnacles off the hull or painting the bright work or swabbing the deck. His job is to oversee and manage the process by which the ship is being readied to start drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico starting April 1. The two tall grey structures in the picture are the drilling rigs (the yellow cranes are attached to the dock and are being used for maintenance tasks). The bridge and helipad are on the left.
Chris’s history in this business is interesting.
After graduating from Maine Maritime Academy Chris signed on as a maintenance engineer on rigs drilling in the Gulf and off the coast of Brazil. His company sent him to South Korea to help oversee construction of a number of these billion-dollar rigs. He traveled with one of the rigs across the Atlantic and was promoted to be the Chief Maintenance Officer. Then, with the crash in crude oil prices, drilling ground to a halt. Chris’s job was to put the rigs into mothballs, tied up at a dock in the Canary Islands off Spain and to keep the complex and expensive systems in a satisfactory state of repair. Things dragged on and one or more of the drilling ships have been sold for scrap, two have been sold to Elon Musk’s Space X for a reported $1 Million to serve as floating launch platforms. The ship we saw today is being readied to be placed back in service. Chris’s dad told me one of relatively simple tasks is to replace 40,000 hydraulic hoses. These are big, complicated beasts where the cost of breakdown and system failure is huge.
So tomorrow ends our Tesla Road Trip. While we’ve been gone, workers have gutted our Sun City Center kitchen and replaced all the cabinets and fixtures. We’ll send a couple of pictures when we get home so you can see the result. I also plan on producing a statistical analysis of the Tesla’s performance and cost of operation, along with a qualitative review of what it’s like to travel by EV. Judy will also provide her thoughts about traveling cross-country in a Tesla.
