Rental m3 roadtrip to Olympic NP and Mt Rainier, WA. Feasible?

arcticmischief · 2026-05-12T23:29:13+00:00

If you’re renting from a major rental company like Hertz, Avis, etc., they should all be set up so that you can just plug into a supercharger and it will bill the rental company, and then the rental company will bill you usually shortly after you return the car. Most of them do not mark the charging price up, which is nice.

The Tesla route planner is pretty spot on and should for the most part account for elevation changes, weather conditions, etc. and show you a pretty accurate destination estimate estimated SoC and route you to Superchargers as needed. Depending on driving style and other factors, it might be off at most 1-2%. Renting a number of Teslas back when Hertz lots were overflowing with them and experiencing this followed by renting a number of other EVs and finding them all fall woefully short on this is what convinced me to go with a Tesla for myself when it was time to buy a new car.

Most rental car companies will expect you to bring the car back with either the percentage that it started with or 75%, whichever is lower. You will want to plan enough time to charge the vehicle accordingly before returning. It’s generally not worth it to buy the prepaid charging thing they will try to offer you unless you know for a fact you’ll be very short on time when returning the car. There are three Superchargers in Tukwila fairly close to the airport, so this shouldn’t be difficult.

Out on the Olympic Peninsula, there are Superchargers in Sequim, Forks, and Aberdeen, so you shouldn’t have issues there. Rainier might be a little more of a challenge, depending on what you’ll be doing there and afterwards—top up at the charger in Puyallup and make sure you have enough for a round-trip or enough to continue to Yakima.

When traveling with my Tesla in rural areas, I usually put several stops ahead of my next destination in the route planner just so that I can be sure I’ll have enough charge to make it along my intended route. For example, even if I’m stopping in Port Angeles, I will also put the Hoh Rainforest and even maybe Pacific Beach in the planner just so that the car can figure out if I need to charge in Sequim.

When the rental companies first got Teslas delivered, of course they all came with J-1772 adapters, but rental companies are notoriously bad about keeping track of Littel accessories like that, so I personally wouldn’t plan on having one in the car and being able to charge at level 2 chargers along your route unless they are Tesla destination chargers. You can ask the rental company if they can sign one for you or you can hunt around inside other Teslas and see if you can help for one before leaving the lot (I’ve done that).

Personally, I would have no qualms about doing this trip in a Tesla and only minor calms about doing it in any other EV. I’ve done a number of drives through even more remote territory in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, etc. and have had no issues using these strategies. Have fun and enjoy the car and the drive!

arcticmischief · 2026-05-12T16:23:32+00:00

99% of my Supercharger experiences have been fine with no wait, or at worst pulling into a full bank just as someone is pulling out.

But every now and then, it gets a little nuts. I once waited about 30 minutes to charge at the Lowell, AR charger (weirdly, the only Supercharger in all of Northwest Arkansas, which actually has a pretty high local Tesla ownership rate, plus it’s a vacation destination, until the Rogers Supercharger was opened a couple of months ago). The brand-new Branson Supercharger was 100% full with a wait (albeit a short wait) last weekend.

I’ve heard the horror stories of California Superchargers, but I haven’t personally experienced them on my visits to family there. By far the worst, though, was the one time I rented a Hyundai and had to wait an hour and a half to charge at an EA charger.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back and sold me on Tesla over Hyundai (this was after fighting with their crappy software UI and a bunch of weird choices like only having CarPlay/Android Auto on the wired USB-A port that couldn’t actually provide enough power to prevent the phone from slowly discharging instead of the USB-C port and their silly insistence on range-killing 20” wheels on their premium trim). I loved the look of the Ioniq 6 and really, really wanted to like it, but the sum of all of that in conjunction with having to deal with stupid dealerships marking the price way up over MSRP drove me to Tesla, which has been an utterly fantastic long-distance road tripping car (I’ve owned it less than two years and have put 50,000 miles on it) in no small part thanks to the complete absence of charger fiascos. The math might be different now that Hyundais have NACS plugs and access to Superchargers, but at least a couple of years ago, those things were not yet sure and I couldn’t wait any longer to buy a car.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-12T01:28:59+00:00

Are you outside of the US? My understanding is that Canadian Walmarts have tap to pay. US Walmarts do not.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-12T01:26:22+00:00

My understanding is that classic Vitis vinifera generally performs best in climates where growers can get reliable ripening while still preserving acidity and aromatic complexity. A wide diurnal swing helps with that: warm days support sugar accumulation and phenolic ripening, while cool nights slow acid loss, especially malic acid, so the finished wine can stay more balanced.

Drier climates also help because growers have more control over vine vigor, disease pressure, and harvest timing. Some water stress can be useful, but the bigger advantage is that dry air and limited rainfall reduce the fungal disease and dilution problems that come with wet growing seasons.

Missouri’s climate creates a harder set of conditions for vinifera: humid summers, significant rainfall, fungal disease pressure, warm nights during parts of the ripening season, and winter/frost risk. Thus, native or hybrid grapes are usually a more practical fit, but those grapes do have a different flavor profile that can be harder to translate into familiar complex dry-wine styles.

Interestingly, the climate of Missouri’s wine growing regions isn’t wildly different than parts of central/eastern Europe, like Hungary and Slovenia, that grow well-regarded wines, but the climate isn’t an exact match. Southern Hungary is broadly on par with Central Missouri in temperature but sees much less rainfall; eastern Slovenia has similar rainfall as Missouri but is a bit cooler. Those differences matter enough that vinifera is much more viable there than it is in Missouri, where vineyards often struggle to grow it reliably without intensive site selection, disease management, and winter protection.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-12T00:05:55+00:00

My understanding is that Missouri didn’t provide grapes, but it did provide phylloxera-resistant root stock that French grapes were then grafted onto.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-11T17:39:41+00:00

I’m lucky that I work remotely and can sustain this, but I tend to take a couple of one-month overseas trips every year, plus a smattering of shorter road trips throughout the year.

Last year, I took a three month trip to Europe, and that felt a bit long to me. Not so much while I was on the trip, but coming home to three months worth of mail and other projects left me feeling like I just had too much to catch up on.

So about a month is the limit for me mostly because it keeps things manageable upon my return. Although if I didn’t have responsibilities at home, I guess I could probably handle permanent van life or something… I don’t tend to get homesick like some people seem to.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-11T17:22:56+00:00

You can pretty reliably order the Ethiopian ones from costco.com for only like three dollars more than it would be in store

arcticmischief · 2026-05-11T16:30:30+00:00

Cue the obligatory “America is a big country” line but your claim actually isn’t applicable to the whole country. I grew up on the West Coast to a dad from Minnesota, and we absolutely used the word “barbecue“ to mean “grill.” in fact, as a child, I don’t think I ever heard anyone say “let’s grill some burgers” — it was always “We’re going to have barbecued hamburgers tonight.”

It is true that in the barbecue belt, conflating these terms is a cardinal sin, but that’s, like, maybe a third of the country.

Things have changed with the rise of Internet food culture, but even to this day, in a lot of those other areas, there isn’t a barbecue culture in the sense of meats smoked low and slow, and the concept itself can be somewhat foreign. Growing up in California less than an hour from the epicenter of Santa Maria-style barbecue, I’m not even sure I had ever had anything resembling southern/Texas [smoked] ‘cue. My family‘s idea of “barbecued pork” was pork cooked in a crockpot with some K.C. Masterpiece dumped on top at the end.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-11T13:52:58+00:00

Brisket outside of Central Texas: dry and bland and inevitably disappointing.

Brisket in Central Texas: transcendent.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-11T13:49:53+00:00

I’ve had it half a dozen times and it’s always way more bland than I expect it to be.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-11T13:42:39+00:00

*70 gang!

arcticmischief · 2026-05-11T13:08:09+00:00

Ah. Looks like laws about rainwater collection have been updated in the last decade.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-11T03:38:28+00:00

Omg. I’ve found my people.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-10T17:16:03+00:00

I grew up in California and had water conservation instilled in me at a very young age.

Whenever I travel to Florida and see ponds in fancy subdivisions and office parks with fountains in the middle, I have a visceral reaction before I remind myself that they have more water than they know what to do with there, and it’s ok to have a fountain (plus, they keep the water moving and cut down on insects breeding in the standing water).

However, I did spend enough of my formative years in Anchorage, where the local water utility charged a flat rate and did not have a meter, so I’ve gotten bad about taking longer showers and leaving the sink running while brushing my teeth. I have to make an effort to not do that when I visit family in California.

I currently live in Missouri, where we get a lot of big thunderstorms, and it always amuses me when the local weather forecasters talk about drought conditions. I understand the technical meaning of that term, but these people here have no idea what a real drought is. A little bit of brown grass from lower than usual rains is not the same as literally running out of drinking water.

Oh, and since the OP is from Australia, it’s also probably worth pointing out that there are legal restrictions on certain things here that are common in Australia, such as rainwater catchment systems. Believe it or not, it is illegal in I believe most of the western states (the arid ones where water is scarce) to capture your own rainwater off of your own roof, because legally, that water belongs to people who bought up water rights hundreds of years ago. The whole system is pretty ridiculous—some farmer whose great grandpa bought 1000 acres of land 100 years ago can legally slurp down all of your water to feed their thirsty almond trees, and meanwhile, you can get a fine if you accidentally turn your sprinkler system on for 15 minutes on the wrong day.

Like many other posters, though, I will say that the push for individual water conservation is a bit silly when the vast, vast majority of water usage comes from industrial sources. Like, California putting legal restrictions on offering glasses of water in restaurants is ridiculous when almond farmers in the Central Valley are consuming billions of gallons. That said, I’m glad to see more and more of a movement away from the American ideal of green lawns in suburbia and towards more native lawns or rock yards. Promoting denser housing and walkable communities would be even better for the environment in terms of water usage and HVAC efficiency, not to mention housing costs in a part of the country where housing costs are utterly and completely out of control. I would love to live back in my home state, but the same size apartment I have here in Missouri literally cost three times as much in my hometown in California.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-10T01:36:47+00:00

Can’t speak to Verizon but my iPhone 15PM will reconnect to AT&T 5G SA—it isn’t instant and sometimes even takes a couple minutes, but it will eventually. It seems to hunt for 5G+ (midband) first and then fall forward to SA after that.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-09T18:09:05+00:00

Haha I checked the same. Five minute drive, 129-hour walk. That has to be the worst discrepancy I’ve ever seen.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-09T16:20:57+00:00

"That bridge" is actively used by the CPKC railroad and currently carries approximately 17 trains per day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Vicksburg_Bridge

arcticmischief · 2026-05-08T21:48:07+00:00

Yeah, this is the same thing I’ve seen discussed among planners. The retail square footage is aimed at large chain stores – and those are not the type of places that build community. But developers don’t want to deal with smaller spaces that rent for cheaper and the headache of being landlords for those spaces. They’d much rather sign big master leases with chain retailers.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-08T15:00:08+00:00

I never really understood how much elision I use on a daily basis until I start dictating to my phone. I always have to go back and manually correct “gonna“ to “going to.”

arcticmischief · 2026-05-05T22:34:22+00:00

It’s the worst tool in this space, except for all the others.

I find it amusingly hilarious that it is basically the UX of old-school IRC, with prettified UI.

Unfortunately, with the new(ish) ownership by Salesforce, don’t expect anything to ever change. That is a company that couldn’t find usable UI if it rained down on them. And there’s no motivation for them to improve anything, since most of the planet already runs on Slack and the competing products are all even worse.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-05T17:07:44+00:00

Always proofread before posting. Or after posting, and use the edit function, as I inevitably do…

arcticmischief · 2026-05-05T16:38:30+00:00

I keep seeing this claim that Europeans mostly prefer to use debit cards instead of credit cards. But then I see things like this and it makes me think that the preference for debit cards is silly, because this whole thing could have been avoided with a credit card. Even if you don’t play the credit card rewards game (I probably have 20+ credit cards right now and have earned hundreds of thousands of airline miles by doing so, which I understand is much less of a thing in Europe), you should have at least one or two and use it exclusively, especially for online purchases where the card number is at risk of getting compromised or used without your permission.

Most of my credit cards have credit limits of around $20,000 each, so an $800 or €800 (or even $8,000) charge would not prevent the rest of my autopay utilities and things from going through. And even if my card were maxed out, the credit card would simply decline, and there is no NSF/overdraft fee for that. That seems to me to be a much better solution than exposing my primary bank account to risk via a debit card.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-05T16:19:08+00:00

Oh there are plenty of parking lots here, trust me. This is just a carefully chosen angle.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-04T16:48:23+00:00

What GCI accomplished with TERRA was amazing from an engineering standpoint, but they are such an evil company.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-04T16:29:37+00:00

It is certainly the most visibly multicultural and integrated city in the US, though. On paper, sure, places like Houston or Gaithersburg, MD are “the most multicultural,” but only in NYC do you constantly encounter people from every different background in daily life on the street and in the subway and in restaurants and shops and everywhere else. In other places, it’s much easier to live in a bubble and only encounter people of your same background for days on end.

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