Saturday (April 5) I woke up feeling pensive. The sky was gray and dribbling rain.

Twenty years ago, my gasoline car broke down on the Chicago Skyway. The closest shoulder was the left one right next to the hammer lane. I didn’t carry a cell phone at the time and it took several hours for a tow truck to arrive. It was the most terrifying three hours of my life. Cars and trucks blasting past a couple feet away from my vehicle. All it would have taken is one inattentive driver to punch my ticket to the hereafter. Was spending several weeks in an electric car hopping from charging station to charging station asking for a repeat of that terror? Well, uh, yeah, it kinda was.

Nevertheless, I had breakfast, squeezed my Sweetie, pushed Start, and with a quiet hum Nell gently carried me away on an adventure.

My vision of this trip was a trip across the U.S. watching the spring come in and the flowers bloom. This was not that. It was gray. The NWS had flood warnings along my route. So I had to hunker down and pay attention. I teed up my favorite podcast (I find Sarah Longwell’s cackle reassuring), but, as you might have noticed, this country is going through some things. So, uh, not exactly barrel of monkeys material.

I drove 165 miles to Collinsville, Illinois. I still had plenty of charge, but I wasn’t inclined to push things on the first day so I decided to stop and top up at an Electrify America station in a Wal-Mart parking lot. While Nell charged, I went inside used the facilities, bought a sandwich and a bag of apples. By the time I finished my sandwich, she was ready to go.

I added 47 kWh (Nell’s battery holds 82). The charge cost me nothing since the first 30 minutes of charging is free. If I hadn’t been traveling on Hyundai’s dime, Electrify America would have charged me $26.43 or about 16 cents a mile ($26.43/165 miles). Of course, when I charge at home Ameren charges me about 25 percent of what Electrify America charges. So traveling around Central Illinois, I pay 4 cents a mile. It’s also worth mentioning that for $7 a month, Electrify America will sell you a Plus Membership that gives you a 25 percent discount when you charge so then your cost would only be about 12 cents a mile.

As I crossed the Mississippi into Missouri, the rain picked up. There was a steady downpour, but at times the rain reached a level that my father’s buddy Paul Hilgenberg once described as “a cow pissing on a flat rock.” If you’ve never seen a Holstein relieve herself, . . . well . . . it’s impressive. So I just hunkered down in the right lane, let the adaptive cruise radar peer through the gloom to ensure that I didn’t rear-end anyone.

This trip was off to a decidedly unglamorous start. My brother Mark makes a very nice living as a long-haul truck driver, but deals with this and much worse everyday while managing 18 wheels and 80,000 pounds of truck and freight. Respect.

As I drove, I passed a fresh accident. A guy in an SUV had sideswiped the center pillars on an overpass and come back into roadway. There was debris everywhere, but no emergency vehicles had showed up yet. I gingerly picked my way through the debris field hoping that nothing would puncture a tire. About 20 miles on a pickup and gooseneck trailer hauling a mobile home had gone off the road to the right crossed through the retaining fence and were blocking a frontage road. Soon after that, there was a Chrysler Caravan with it’s nose solidly embedded in the center median ditch with its flashers flashing.

More respect for Mark.

Also, don’t drive around on bald tires. It’s true that your tire guy’s job is to sell you tires not make sure that you get every last mile out of your tires, but it’s better to buy tires before you “really need” them than have Newtonian physics take the wheel and carom around the highway like a bowling ball. Seriously.

My next stop to recharge was 176 miles down the road at a Casey’s in Lebanon, Missouri. Due to conditions, Nell was using a little more juice so she needed to 67 kWh to top up while I had a bathroom break, a snack, and caught up with some e-mail. This took a little longer than 30 minutes so I wound up spending $6.32 for the portion of the charge that wasn’t on Hyundai’s dime. Had I just paid out of pocket, it would have cost me $37.46 (or $28.10 if I had a Plus Membership).

After Lebanon, the rain finally stopped and I had dry pavement. It was still gray, but the redbuds along the roadside were peaking and provided a nice magenta seasoning to monochrome landscape.

After 170 miles, I pulled over for supper and a charge at a Walmart in Vinita, Oklahoma. This time Nell slurped up 65 kWh and I paid $5.69 out of pocket, but a retail customer would have paid $36.45 (or $27.34 with a membership). There was a little more cuisine d’Walmart on this first day than I would have like, but perhaps things would improve on Day 2.

Fully charged, I headed back out into the dusk. My destination was a La Quinta Inn next to an Electrify America charger in Moore, Oklahoma. It had been a long day and I was tired, but I didn’t want to drink caffeine because then I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

As it happens my wife is a very skilled alto. A few years back she formed a quartet, Friends In Song, that recorded an album. The harmonizing is quite lovely and I sometimes get a little moisture around the eyes when I listen to it. So I called up their album on Apple CarPlay and played it over Nell’s quite good stereo system. Although I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, I sang along to the bass line. Nell didn’t seem to mind.

Before I knew it we had traveled the 177 miles to Moore and I was ready to turn in.

Day 1: 688 miles traveled. $12.01 Spent on “Gas”. $51.08 in “gas” money contributed by Hyundai. Cost of gas with an Electrify America membership $47.32.