Cross-country Trip - best & worst place types to charge up the PiP.

Folks,

I got my PiP on 22 April 2012. On 30 May I left for a week-long, 3474-mile trip from Virginia through the Midwest and back (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Detroit, Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Chicago, Kansas City and Louisville). Despite being a ChargePoint member, I found very few places convenient to charge up, other than friends' garages. As a result I can now comment what seems to make the best types of places to charge up, and what are the worst, almost-impossible-to-charge types of places, without depending on public charging stations.

Worst places: any type of hotel or motel except the very fanciest or the 1950-s style motor court motels. Why: all the normal hotels and inns are separated from their parking lots by wide swaths of grass, and the only place you can approach the building wall with its receptacles is right at the covered entranceway, where obviously no one will let you park for 3 hours or overnight. So, although all the hotel clerks offered to let me plug in "if you can find an accessible receptacle", any such receptacles I did find were simply unreachable.

Best places to charge up: counterituitively, almost any gas station is a good place, especially ones with a convenience store. Why: every convenience store I used had receptacles on its front wall separated from pull-in store parking by a narrow sidewalk, within easy reach of an EVSE. Every convenience store clerk I asked (and of course I always ask) was happy to accomodate, and I left the EVSE plugged-in while I went on my way to eat or stretch legs & shop for sundries at the usual strip mall behind the gas station. Plus, nearly every time I charged up the EVSE was a pathway to multiple friendly conversations with mechanics, with teens, with other gas station patrons and with their delivery men. I often had people wait until I returned to have them ask me their 300 questions.

Second-best charging places: most (not all!) Toyota, Nissan and Mitsubishi dealerships. Why: because they have usually unused Level 2 chargers hangin' off their walls, and they were glad to let me use it free every time I asked, probably calculating the minimal cost of electricity against the returns of educating the public about their EV products. Why the dealerships are second-best choices: because they aren't as numerous and thus as convenient to use as a gas station, and because not every dealership has a Level 2 charger installed at this time.

I hope this is helpful.

BTW - with only six charge-ups, some of them partial (lack of time at the gas stations once I ate etc.) I still got a 49.9 MPG average for the 3474-mile trip, with all the rain, heat, highway speeds etc. I used something like 65 gallons.