When I was coming back to the Kootenays from Kelowna in early October in my electric vehicle (a Nissan Leaf), I travelled through the Strawberry Pass on my way to Rossland and noticed that the larches were all a brilliant golden yellow. There is a set of trails in an area just north of Rossland known as Larch Ridge, and I wanted to take my family to show them before all the needles fell, so we decided to go the weekend right after I got home.
Category: Nissan Leaf
A Tale of Two Journeys – Part Two
This post is the trip report of our journey to Sechelt and back in June 2015. The trip came out of an invitation to participate in a planning workshop for future deployment of Direct Current Fast Chargers (DCFCs) in British Columbia (BC). For a quick primer on different levels of EV charging, head here.
Part 1 of this series can be found here and includes a description of the planning process. For this post, we’re headed straight to the journey itself.
For the TLDR; version (“too long, did not read!”), skip right to the heading at the bottom for “Trip Takeaways”).
A quick reminder on our trip plan – we would work our way across southern BC on Highway 3, utilizing Level 2 charging infrastructure over 2 days until we reached the Level 3 DCFC infrastructure in the Lower Mainland on the 3rd day.
The post title is a reference to how the trip would encompass two fundamentally different types of charging and provide a stark comparison of the reality (as of June 2015) of long-distance travel via Level 2 chargers vs the future: the expanding network of DCFCs!
The First Journey (seeing the sights!)
Knowing that we had set a pretty ambitious time to leave town of 10 am on Friday June 12 (hey that’s early when you have two young kids!), we did a fair amount of packing on the Thursday night, then got up the next morning and proceeded to cram everything in… and left at the bright and early hour of 11:30 am! Continue reading A Tale of Two Journeys – Part Two
Easter Weekend Trifecta
On the Easter weekend of 2015 we were able to experience our first “Kootenay Trifecta”; one of the many reasons we decided to move here was the possibility of gardening in the same weekend as skiing. Continue reading Easter Weekend Trifecta
Cost update – Feb to April 2015
The car just rolled over 36,000 km and it is 1 week away from owning the car for one year now – right about what I had estimated for kilometres. Time for a cost report update! (The first cost report I posted can be found here.)
The big news item in the intervening 3 months was the return of the Clean Energy Vehicle incentive, which for a Leaf is $5,000 off of the purchase price. I have added a Leaf with this incentive added to illustrate what the incentive would have done, in my case anyways.
Lucky 27,777km and February 2015 Cumulative Cost Update
The title image is one of many places we have been able to travel to solely on electric power, thanks to our 2014 Nissan Leaf! Here we all are at Kokanee Creek Provincial Park: Continue reading Lucky 27,777km and February 2015 Cumulative Cost Update
Driving up to winter at Kokanee Glacier Park
The weather has been cold and clear in Nelson for the last week now. From our home, we get a tantalizing view of the mountain peaks covered in snow, and we woke up this morning wanting to get a better view. We had not been all the way up to Kokanee Glacier Park before, so we looked it up on the provincial parks website.
“Hmm, 20 km out to Kokanee Creek park, then 16 km of dirt road up the Kokanee Creek valley from Kootenay Lake, and the parking lot is at 1,570 m!” It was -3 C at our house, so it would only get colder going up. Driving slow up a bumpy dirt road with the heat on, and gaining just over 1,000m was going to do a number on the battery. Continue reading Driving up to winter at Kokanee Glacier Park